Almost overnight Nintendo’s Pokémon GO (PoGO) has taken augmented reality, a viable technology to create immersive and incredibly desirable customer experiences, from a niche market to a mass.
Pokémon GO is already outstripping Tinder on app installs. It has more daily active users than Twitter with people spending 43 minutes a day on average playing it, having a higher dwell time than WhatsApp, Instagram and Snapchat. Pokémon Go is seeing more than double the industry average retention rate with 7 out of 10 people who downloaded the app returning the next day.
It has already been dubbed ‘a cultural phenomenon’ and a saviour for Nintendo. The demand for Pokémon GO saw Nintendo’s shares surge by a quarter in value on Monday.
The tidal wave of participation has already inspired other businesses to become part of the show.
Entrepreneurs are building new revenue streams. Gamers are offering 1-4 hour ($20 per hour) shifts so the gameplay doesn’t have to stop while you are at work. If you are pressed for time, Pokémon Taxi services are at hand to take you to Pokémon stops and locations. Maybe we will see a UBER-Pokémon Go partnership.
Huge Cafe in Atlanta is across the street from two Pokémon Go ‘PokéStops’. They have paid $49 to buy in-game “coins” that can be traded in for 40 in-game “lures”. These can be ‘attached’ to PokéStops and work as smoke-signals to attract Pokémon and users. Each ‘lure’ works for 30 minutes and attracts rarer and more powerful Pokémon to the area, and in turn gamers.
Here are five reasons why you should start thinking about Pokémon Go brand opportunities:
[ctt template=”1″ link=”39g_7″ via=”yes” ]Total shares of ‘Pokemon Go’ online content rose by 535% in a 4 day period @OMD_EMEA[/ctt]
That means publishers and clients with relevant content have already captured some of the 11 million+ shares from consumers. Considering this looks set to be a consistent source of ongoing traffic, there is a massive opportunity that exists for brands!
[ctt template=”1″ link=”fT8Zr” via=”no” ]#PokémonGo on Facebook shows continuous growth– 21K players have shown interest in events & page likes have increased +131% over the weekend[/ctt]
Have you considered Facebook content around Pokémon to put your brand into the conversation?
[ctt template=”1″ link=”3DiRF” via=”no” ]#PokémonGo opens up a new world of location-based marketing – did you know 10,000+ people are interested in the ‘London massive lure party’? [/ctt]
A quick search on Eventbrite also shows everything from a Pokémon 5k run to bar crawls. The creative potential seems only constrained by our imagination and the time to start thinking about it is now.
[ctt template=”1″ link=”HB6UT” via=”yes” ]#PokémonGo appears to lend itself (if done well) to non-gaming topics like travel, dining and fashion @OMD_EMEA[/ctt]
[ctt template=”1″ link=”9qOAb” via=”no” ]Google Trends monitors a breakout of search queries for ‘Pokemon Go Tips’ rising 140% in the first 24 hours to over 5,000% by the 5th day[/ctt] Could your brand fill the demand / supply content gap with something that speaks to your audience?
There’s plenty of traffic and social shares going on – #gottacatchemall!
What does this cultural phenomenon mean for your brand? Need more information or interested in exploring Pokémon branded opportunities – contact us at [email protected]
In a world where the customer is increasingly in control, what do you think about the changing role for companies like OMD?
Previously when I started in the business, we were able to take our audiences for granted. We were able to broadcast and publicise our point of views and our clients’ point of views quite easily – we had a guaranteed audience. We cannot take audiences for granted anymore. We have to earn the right. We have to avoid ad blocking. We have to avoid the distraction of choice that we never had. In fact, even the words ‘audience,’ ‘target audience,’ ‘our audience,’ ‘our customers’ speaks of a world where we’ve learnt to take too many things for granted and I think that is the big change that I have seen.
We’re interested to hear from you on how the role of media has evolved over recent years and what the future of effective media planning looks like, within both OMD and across the broader Industry?
Media planning was how much TV you could afford and in the last five to ten years it has changed beyond all recognition. I think it has become a story less about media planning and channel planning because what we really meant was what audience is more or less likely on the margins to consume various types of mass media. It sounds a little bit like a cliché, but I think we are moving from media planning to content distribution, from media planning to the sharing of stories. I think that requires much less emphasis on channels and much more of an emphasis on how you promote sharing, how you make your stories more attractive. I think it’s that difference between the age we left behind, which is about targeting, and the age we’re moving into, which is about attraction, it is probably the single biggest dynamic.
How do you think the skills required to be successful in media and marketing have changed, and what do the successful professionals of tomorrow look like versus those of yesterday?
So, I think at the moment it helps to be something of a polymath, there is almost too much we need to know. Our business is full of experts and needs to be full of specialist experts as the scope and scale of what we do broadens from content to technology, managing data, statistics modelling, all the way through to our digital services and, of course, we still have the age-old skills of being able to listen to clients.
Similarly, when you think about how the conversations you have with your clients are changing, what are the key things they are most concerned with and how do you drive best in class discussions with your client base? How do you see these discussions continuing to evolve in the future?
Conversations for clients are always about value and value delivery. The nature of that value delivery changes and has changed significantly. The value we deliver is less about not paying too much for your media and more about the value return of building brands and the value return on growing a company’s revenue, not just in the short-term but in the longer term too. Historically, I think there has tended to be a focus on the short-term, what we used to call the short-term, versus the long-term. The short-term sales versus the longer term health and brand building. You can’t have an either or conversation anymore: it has to be ‘and’. You have to win in the today and you have to be winning for tomorrow as well. You have to do both at the same time and I think that is something that has become absolutely clear in the last few years.
I think the way we do that, and the way we are trying to do it more within OMD, is to productise what we do a little bit more by taking what we do and working out a way of how we systemise it, how we make sure we can deliver a more consistent problem-solving product with sharper insights, smarter ideas and stronger results for every client, every brief, every time. We are exploring platform-led ways of integrating our entire global team together to ensure standard ways of delivery and standard ways of quality controlling outputs from our teams. I think that it is quite new and different, and a much better way of problem-solving going forward.
What are you most excited about for Cannes 2016?
I think for me the thing I enjoy most is catching up with colleagues, friends and people you haven’t seen for a while. And of course, there are a lot of important client meetings, of course, there is a lot of partner meetings and there are some really great conversations that you can have here because it is one of the few times in the year that everyone is in the same place. It sounds like a very self-serving justification for everyone being here, but you can get an enormous amount done in a relatively short period of time because everyone is here.
Cisco were receiving poor quality sales leads from their lead generation campaigns, which were failing to convert. Although we were targeting the right people with the right products and solutions, and receiving high volumes of data at a low cost per lead from a number of publishers, the campaigns weren’t delivering actual sales results.
The problem was that the prospects themselves weren’t engaged or informed, and consequently weren’t ready to be turned into customers when Cisco came around to contacting them. Quite simply, despite being identified as viable leads, these prospects were unaware of what specific solutions Cisco could offer them, or the potential benefits. As a result, conversion rates (and sales) were very low.
So when Cisco’s new mobility offering was ready to launch, we saw it as a perfect opportunity to supercharge the approach through a new strategic partnership, generating high quality, sales qualified leads from our prospect data.
The strategy
Rather than working with multiple publishers to generate volume, we decided to focus our efforts on developing a single strategic partnership where we could work together to increase the quality of the leads, both by better targeting and better engaging our prospects.
IDG’s market reach, audience profile and potential to deliver made them the ideal partner for Cisco. We approached them and proposed a fully transparent collaborative partnership that would see the two organisations completely sharing and aligning resources in a way rarely seen in this industry. We started by discarding the traditional divisions of ‘client’ and ‘publisher’, and set up a special cross-discipline task force, with a set of high KPIs to meet. This partnership would offer a unique opportunity to break down the usual constraints and barriers, and come together as a fully integrated team, focused on delivering great results.
The idea behind this bespoke solution was to make sure we were driving engagement, as well as qualifying leads. To do this we needed full transparency across the team, enabling seamless sharing of our collective knowledge and expertise. Our new collaborative approach enabled us to invent and implement innovative ways to deliver quality leads, by fully engaging and informing our target audience.
Making it a reality
Sharing regular insights, conversion data, feedback on quality and internal process concerns were essential to the partnership and allowed us to identify areas where each party could improve processes and methodology.
Previously we focussed on delivering BANT leads via telemarketing which qualified the user with the below criteria:
Budget available
Purchase authority
Relevant projects
Project timescale
We needed to find a solution which delivered qualified leads whilst increasing content to maximise engagement with the target audience. Tying in with the mobility theme, we created a new interactive layer to IDG’s existing ‘i-zone’ mobile app, to host relevant mobility content within a Cisco-branded online zone, while collecting prospect data. Once a user had engaged with this content they were then contacted by IDG’s call centre for further qualification. Only those which met the BANT qualification were classified as accepted and payable, and prioritised for follow-up by Cisco.
After this initial stage of qualification, IDG continued their engagement with more Cisco-related content. A second asset, relevant to their buying stage, was delivered to keep the user engaged while Cisco followed up the lead. This dual approach not only increased the volume of prospect data, but also helped to support the brand KPIs of consideration, by engaging and informing the prospects whilst preparing them for sale.
Throughout the campaign, we continued to collaborate with input from all parties. We regularly shared internal sales information, empowering IDG to fine tune their market focus, and prioritise the targeting, keeping our approach fluid and agile throughout the campaign period.
Results
The campaign achieved impressive results and significant return on investment. Our new partnership and content rich approach delivered, via the branded i-zone, a 133% increase in market-qualified leads (MQLs) delivered to Cisco for follow up.
We saw the biggest increase in the conversion of these leads to the pipeline revenue, with a 3800% increase in sales-qualified lead (SQL) revenue in comparison to standard and TM BANT qualified campaigns.
This approach was such a success that it has now been adopted globally and being rolled out across regions as Cisco’s best practise approach to an “always present” campaign.
Video Games are a global phenomenon with the industry now worth over $23.5 billion. It is, therefore, no surprise that in Germany alone there are over 29 Million gamers. However, the rising love of gaming has resulted in the average child spending up to 136 minutes video gaming a day! Our aim was to re-energise gamers and beat the digital industry with their own weapons.
Bringing gamers into the action
Using the Hasbro Nerf, we sought to get gamers away from the screen and take part of the action whilst unlocking additional growth potential for Hasbro’s fun blaster range.
So how can Hasbro make a lost generation enthusiastic about a range of non-digital toy guns? It was time to fight back for physical fun, but in order to relate to our gamers, we needed to make sure we had a fun digital element. We, therefore, headed straight to the dragon’s den, the biggest international Digital Game Fair in Cologne, and conquered the epicentre of the digital gamer’s world with the most famous influencers of this generation.
An analogue playground
15 YouTube stars invaded the Gamescom equipped with Nerf Blasters turning the whole fair into an analogue playground; proving the strength of real life fun with Nerf. The Gamescom action was recorded and instantly uploaded by the YouTube stars amplifying the Hasbro brand and messages to millions of followers. Moreover, we kicked off a sustainable wave of content creation via the YouTube stars who carried on the Nerf story at home and encouraged their fans to use the hashtag #NerfNicht and create even more real life Nerf-Action Videos online.
The results
A campaign for Nerf’s real live action was born. The results exceeded all expectations with the hashtag #NerfNicht hitting the Top 5 German Twitter trending charts. The videos received over 3.8 Million views (+500% versus benchmark) and 8.2 Million contacts within a 1.9 Million target group, over 190,000 comments and over 653,000 like. Most importantly, Hasbro sold +40% more Nerf Blasters versus the previous year, making Nerf the best performing Hasbro brand (not limited to boys!) in Germany.
With the start of the year seeing the annual CES event bring many of the big tech providers together, we saw some less likely candidates take the main stage as our world continues to change. Share anything interesting you spot with #OMDFWD
HEADLINES
Oculus Rift goes on pre-order for £499 in the UK & $599 in the US, shipping set for March 28th, with the founder suggesting pre-orders are exceeding expectations
Need some help sticking to your New Year healthy eating plan? Use this magical gadget to reveal your foods nutritional value or track the contents of your fridge with the latest announcement from Samsung
[ctt template=”1″ link=”39g_7″ via=”yes” ]Total shares of ‘Pokemon Go’ online content rose by 535% in a 4 day period @OMD_EMEA[/ctt]
[ctt template=”1″ link=”fT8Zr” via=”no” ]#PokémonGo on Facebook shows continuous growth– 21K players have shown interest in events & page likes have increased +131% over the weekend[/ctt]
[ctt template=”1″ link=”3DiRF” via=”no” ]#PokémonGo opens up a new world of location-based marketing – did you know 10,000+ people are interested in the ‘London massive lure party’? [/ctt]
[ctt template=”1″ link=”HB6UT” via=”yes” ]#PokémonGo appears to lend itself (if done well) to non-gaming topics like travel, dining and fashion @OMD_EMEA[/ctt]
[ctt template=”1″ link=”9qOAb” via=”no” ]Google Trends monitors a breakout of search queries for ‘Pokemon Go Tips’ rising 140% in the first 24 hours to over 5,000% by the 5th day[/ctt] Could your brand fill the demand / supply content gap with something that speaks to your audience?
