What is real time marketing?
In this blog I will try and explain the basics of real time marketing.
We live in an on demand world today, we expect answers and responses are we want them now, hold on i mean yesterday.
Gone on the days of waiting 3 - 5 days for a postal reply or even 24 hours for a fax return. We want and expect an instant response.
We are now getting information second by second, this is why physical newspapers are having a hard time, by the time we pick up the paper we already know all the news items.
Real time marketing plays on this on demand instant culture. So what is it? Basically real time marketing is the ability to create some kind of advert or announcement in response to a real time event, news or situation.
The classic example of this is the Oreo tweet in 2013. The event was the Superbowl and there was an incident where the flood lights went out. The PR and marketing team behind Oreo very quickly created the following tweet and it was posted around 15 mins after the incident which lasted for 34 minutes.
The tweet very quickly racked up thousands of retweets and shares. It was relevant and topical and more importantly timely. Now it turns out that the agency 360i who were handling the Oreo PR and social during the event had a 15 man strong team for the duration of the event. These included copywriters and legal and were able to put together this advert in real time.
Many brands have since tried to repeat this kind of success without much luck. It is very hard to be able to produce this kind of campaign and capture peoples attention without it seeming like you are just hijacking the event or situation.
In fact there has been many disasters where brands have tried and really got it wrong.
American Apparels unfortunate attempt at real time did not go down very well after it send this email campaign out during Hurricane Sandy.
Real time marketing is like gambling, you should get involved if you really know what you are doing and maybe not even then.
What you can do is look out for what's happening in your industry or in the general news and if you think you can add value to the conversation in a positive way you can join the conversation. Don't try and hijack every piece of news and try and shoehorn your product or service into it as it just wont work.
Does real time marketing add to the bottom line? I don't know is the answer, but it could be a useful tactic to gain awareness if done in a relevant and contextual manner.
Will there be more real time marketing? Yes without a doubt, there will always be someone willing to risk it all and go for broke and attempt to gain eyeballs and free PR and do something either brilliant or equally very silly.
So there we have it a brief and simple overview of real time marketing. Do you know of any other good or bad examples?
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
Author- Speaker - Consultant. Passionate about all things digital.