Real Time MarketingAre you ready?

Written by Syed Abdul Karim Tanveer

The world is moving in real-time. From a time when the fastest relay riders used to carry messages on a horseback across the US in about ten days to today in a world where Obama’s Election win broke the Twitter record at 327,000 tweets per sec-ond (TPS) when he tweeted his victory message with “Four more years”! This is how far we have come from an era of snail speed to light speed!

Life in the Fast Lane

You changed the world Tim!

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The world is moving in real-time (at least any-thing that can exist in a non-physical state!) thanks to Tim Berners-Lee and Dr. Martin Coo-per. These two gentleman sowed the seeds of what we now know today as the internet and the mobile phone respectively. This is an era where the volume of communication is far greater than any other era known to man. In 2012 we were sending 200,000 texts (SMS) per second. Twitter at least for a few seconds had it’s share of phe-nomenal moments when it recorded an all time high with Obama’s Election win reaching 327,000 tweets per second. This is how far we have come from an era of snail speed to light speed and the key drivers being both the internet and the mobile phone.

Internet has hit many a industries and it will only get worse (depending on how one looks at it). When music CD’s turned to a data stream and when Apple monetized the mp3 through iTunes the music industry changed forever. The same can be said for all kinds of content from movies, books, newspapers and now even magazines with the advent of tablets! Last year Amazon for the first time recorded more ebook sales than printed books marking another milestone in the pivotal shift to digital.

Add to this the mobile context and we are look-ing at a whole new era of media consumption and digital behavior. 2011 was the year when for the first time in history the sales of internet-enabled mobile devices exceeded that of desk-top PC’s and notebook PC’s combined! Of the nearly 2.4 billion internet users worldwide about 1.6 billion of them are using a 3G mobile device, with an year on year growth rate of 35% and we can only expect this figure to go up. The mobile internet era has officially begun and things will

only get faster. Internet is all about speed and right now we are looking at a speed of 100 mbps just around the corner for at least 80 million peo-ple worldwide by the year 2013. By 2016 50% of households worldwide will have access to the Internet through Fibre Optic (FTTH). Although these speeds would bring about a whole new level of digital behavior, for now we are looking at a phenomenon of internet ubiquity where one is never cut-off. “Online Oxygen” as Trendwatching.com aptly named it. Internet is fast-becoming like the air we breathe and with time more people are becoming dependent to ‘internet on the go’ and just like air they can’t seem to do without it!

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What is it that they are doing online? The overarching use of the internet is related to interaction with other people dubbed web 2.0. People are driven by this deep desire to connect with others and social media is giving them ample opportunities to do so by sharing content, exchanging ideas, staying in touch in new ways, to pretty much sharing their entire life online in every way possible. User Generated Content (UGC) is the catch word which is anything from words (blogs, forums, tweets, updates etc.) to more bandwidth dependent applications like uploading and viewing pictures, videos and even playing games online with other people. Proof of this phenomena can be witnessed in the rapid rise of online video sharing! Just for perspective today 72 hours of content is uploaded on YouTube every minute. Facebook as a single platform has grown to a humungous three quarters of a billion. Zynga, the online gaming platform that has seen it’s meteoric rise through Facebook has 150 million active users and is growing at over 15% per year. With mobile this social context gets an additional layer of location. SoLoMo (Social, Location and Mobile), a term coined by John Doerr, is what accelerates this behavior as individuals are now enabled to do all of the above at anytime and anyplace!

The world has gone SoLoMo!

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What does this mean for marketing? At a deeper level, this is fueling the desire for “Instaniety” a term coined in the Luciola 2009 Consumer Trends Report. With mobile allowing access to a whole world of apps 24/7 means we are being spoiled to expect, demand and want everything NOW! There is a whole generation of teens who have only known this and now this behavior is spilling offline into the real world. When Lady Gaga comes out with a new single, no one goes to the nearest HMV store, they go to iTunes and download it online instantly and this is happening worldwide (not all through iTunes of course but through some online music download service or worse an illegal P2P network legal!) Mobile is changing people’s behavior even when it comes to shopping. People are not only using their mobile to scan barcodes, read reviews, compare prices while in a shop but some are even going as far as do-ing the ‘window’ shopping and then buying online from their mobile. Digital is perpetuating the desire for instant gratification and it is here where real-time communications can make a difference and allow brands to engage with consumers in newer ways!

A note of caution, unlike many marketing and strategic planning concepts the idea of real-time commu-nications at least to my mind is not a holistic either-or concept but rather additive or complementary to everything else we do. Why? For one, a large part of the world is still living offline and at the core of this practice is the internet. Perhaps in the not-so-distant future real-time communications would become as conventional as TV or Print campaigns once used to be the cornerstone of all commercial advertis-ing.

Instaniety

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Marketing today is about implementing the entire process instantly, at the spur of the moment. From research and strategy to creative and execution, everything is done ‘here and now’. This is the core essence which enables creation of experiences that combine the online world with the real world and connects brands with consumers in ways that are fresh, engaging and most of all surprising.

Marketing in the Fast Lane

Here and Now!

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So what is real time communication? The way I see it real-time communication is about implementing the entire process instantly, at the spur of the moment. From research and strategy to creative and execution, everything is done ‘here and now’. This is the core essence which enables creation of experiences that combine the online world with the real world and connects brands with consumers in ways that are fresh, engaging and most of all surprising.

How does it work? This can be best explained through an example. This one campaign by KLM brilliantly explains how all these elements come together from a real-time perspective. The starting point was the mindset. A conscious effort was made to use real-time data to mine for passenger interests and surprise them with a gift that was relevant to what they might be looking for. The time difference between discovery and execution was very limited and this is what real-time communications come down to. In this case, the moment a KLM passenger arrives at the airport and uses a social network to update his status on Twitter, Foursquare or Facebook he is filtered by the system, his profile scanned for keywords, his status is matched with his travel itinerary on hand with the KLM staff. Based on this, a gift idea is conceived, purchased from the airport and rushed to him before he boards the aircraft, all done through close coordination with the on-ground airport staff. The result, KLM manages to deliver a relevant, targeted ‘surprise’.

Another example was a Twitter based campaign by Turkcell. The idea was to promote a new smartphone bundled with mobile data. This was done by taking a smartphone, gift-wrapping it in a box and pasting hundreds of post-it notes with a message on them. Using the #turkcell hashtag participants were to tweet the message on the post-it note. With each tweet the post-its were removed uncovering the gift box and if the participant could get a celebrity to retweet the final message they would win the smartphone!

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I Got the PowerReal Time Marketing comes down to four key principles:

1. Power of Listening

2. Power of One

3. Power of Now

4. Power of Speed

Let’s look at each principle now!

Real-time Communications are fueled by online interactions. As we can see by the frequency of status updates, tweets and micro blog posts the volume of these conversations can be very high. This is chal-lenging conventional research methods which give a snapshot at a given point in time. In the digital world, brands are being made and destroyed in real-time therefore research needs to happen on the go as well. A case in point is ‘Gapocalypse’, when GAP changed it’s identity and had to reverse it within a week of it’s rebranding effort owing to strong social media backlash! Although this was an ex-ceptional case highlighting the power of social media, the case for constant social media listening and data analytics as an essential research tool is undebatable.

Power of Listening

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Real-Time Strategic Planning is all about the ‘Power of One’. The experience, the engagement, it’s all 1-on-1, it’s Direct Marketing at a whole new level. This is unlike anything done before through other me-dia. We are not just talking about a hypothetical ‘one’ person. We are talking about actually engaging that one person for who they really are. Social Listening and Data Analytics are enabling marketers to gain access and decode a lot of consumer information in real-time. Thereby the target audience can be profiled to a very granular level. This enables mass customization. It’s these 1-on-1 engagements that are multiplied and replicated through digital media to give real-time campaigns their critical mass. The success of each of these campaigns depends on real-time consumer input whether at the listening stage or at the execution stage.

Power of One

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Real-Time Creativity is about the ‘Power of Now’. The key driver is the reward of ‘instant gratification’. This reward can be anything from a tangible prize to an intangible act of recognition. Unlike the above examples which are both about a tangible reward the Old Spice ‘Responses’ campaign was based on an intangible where the Old Spice guy would respond randomly to someone’s comment, tweet or status update. This acknowledgement and response through a video was the big reward, again all of it happening in real-time further heightened the impact.

Power of Now

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With everything happening in real-time, speed of execution becomes a critical component as well. This is the real test. No matter how brilliant the thinking behind the idea if it is not executed brilliantly it all fails. In a real-time context this challenges goes up a few notches. Imagine if the Old Spice guy did not respond instantly or if the surprise could not be delivered by KLM to the passenger before they boarded the aircraft it would all be a waste of effort.

Power of Speed

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What is the future of real-time communications? As can be seen from the above, real-time communica-tions can be very demanding from an organizational capability perspective. On one hand a strong so-cial listening and data analytics capability is a must to mine for insights, identify audience groups and go as far as profiling and targeting individuals. The other requirements are the ability to ideate and exe-cute concepts that build on the power of now both as a reward and through speed of execution. As these capabilities are developed by agencies real-time communications would become easier to plan and execute. From a marketing planning perspective the role and weight of real-time communications would also depend on how deeply entrenched is digital media consumption for a given market. If the volume of dialogue is limited then listening can only go that far. For a market like UK and other digitally developed markets, the opportunities to engage in real-time communications are abundant. For the Middle East, we are looking at a social media penetration of about 15% half of which are on Facebook. As social media gains volume and Arabic listening capabilities improve we can expect to do more of this here. It is only a matter of time! ‘Instant Gratification’ on the other hand is a universal drive and it is a concept that would be readily embraced.

The Future is Real Time

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Copyright © by Syed Abdul Karim http://incito.syedabdulkarim.com

All photographs used in this book have been licensed for reuse. The photo credits are as below:

“Driving Fast” by Chris-Håvard Berge http://www.flickr.com/photos/chberge/3803475294/

“In the Fast Lane” by boboD90 http://www.flickr.com/photos/bobokumar/4715543479/

“Speed” by Stephan Uhlmann http://su2.info/gallery/misc/08080025_02s_speed

“Future of Marketing: Total Reset” by Gerd Leonhard http://www.flickr.com/photos/gleonhard/8380557000/

“Little On Off” by Paresh Khatri http://dribbble.com/shots/585853-Little-On-Off

“Taco Truck” by Luis Cerezo http://www.flickr.com/photos/luiscerezo/1607880796/

“Night water reflections zoom” by Zen Sutherland http://www.flickr.com/photos/zen/31165138/

“It’s Raining Men” by Diego da Silva http://www.flickr.com/photos/natura_pagana/3802901392/

“Aesthetics of Rock and Roll” by Ulisse Albiati http://www.flickr.com/photos/cyberuly/4540336859/

“Water Drop” by Matt Crosse http://evilmatt69.deviantart.com/art/Water-Drop-152750501

Real Time Marketing

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“UV Blur Dance Party” by Proussakis http://proussakis.deviantart.com/art/UV-Blur-Dance-Party-146831472

“Steam Train at Speed” by James Higgott http://www.flickr.com/photos/higgott/6149199165/

“Festival Lights Background” by http://christmasstockimages.com/

“About the Author” Photograph by Suleman Abdullah

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Syed Abdul Karim is a strategist by profession. He has been involved with the advertising, marketing and branding industry for over 13 years. His experience spans across markets, categories and disci-plines. His journey began with Ogilvy in 2000 and continued with DDB since 2005. Besides heading the Strategic Planning function at DDB in the Middle East which entails building the team and nurtur-ing new talent Abdul Karim is also responsible for both new business pitching and enhancing organi-zation capacity. This includes initiating thought leadership programs and conducting training work-shops across the network. Some high profile achievements include developing a proprietary Telecom Branding tool for DDB that was published as a yellow paper - the first from the Gulf region. Other en-trepreneurial initiatives include setting up of Bulls Eye - the first Strategic Marketing Agency in Paki-stan which grew to become one of the largest agencies in the country. Abdul Karim in his free time actively participates as a speaker, writer and blogger both on a personal and professional level.

You can find out more about him here: http://www.syedabdulkarim.com

- Download the Telecom Branding Paper here: http://www.brandchannel.com/images/papers/450_telecombranding_final.pdf

- Visit Incito Mentis - Syed Abdul Karim’s blog here: http://incito.syedabdulkarim.com

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About the Author