Saudi firms need to think out of the box
of followers to promote their products, or to look for YouTube shows with high number of views to sponsor.
What made the situation even worse is the sudden boom of social media marketing agencies, with nothing under their belt other than a number of contacts of highly influential Tweeps or YouTube producers, promoting products in a very dull and boring way; no creativity, no deep knowledge of branding and positioning.
Maybe we should learn a thing or two from how big companies are using social media to promote their products and position their brands. Mashable has listed the “5 top social media campaigns of 2014” with each and every campaign using a different technique to reach out to customers.
I particularly liked two of those campaigns. First, there is the AT&T — the giant American telecom provider. Now if you do not know about the campaign already, what would you think the campaign is all about? I bet you would have thought of a number of celebrities directly promoting the services of AT&T! wrong.
The campaign was a web-series produced by the company to target teenage users. “If there are three things that teenagers love, it’s reality TV, social media and their cellphones. AT&T combined the three in its social media reality series @SummerBreak, which followed eight friends during their last summer together before college.” Mashable reported.
The targeted customers got attracted to the message, interacted with the series and its cast, and s cored millions of hits on different social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. The campaign was success-
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ful to the point that the company decided to go for a new season of the series.
In a creative way, they positioned their brand as a part of youth lives, accompanying them in their first lives’ journeys and challenges. The second campaign that caught my attention was the one developed by Chevrolet and the American Cancer Society. The campaign was called “Purple Your Profile,” it started with a video aired during the 2014 Super Bowl, featuring a couple riding a Chevy and holding hands, giving signals that they are coming back from a journey of battling cancer. The video was followed by asking Facebook users to purple their profile, donating $1 for everyone who participated. The campaign was able to raise around $1 million for cancer charities.
Is it possible to see such powerful campaigns in our local market, just for a change? I certainly hope so.