Went to my next session on the “Marketing Masters” series. These were quick 25 minute presentations on some of the best practices & usage of the digital space for their products by Digital Marketing professionals. Ramswaroop from Sapient talks about Footlocker. They were facing an uphill battle competing against the likes of Nike, Adidas etc. They created a series of videos of “Sneaker Experts” (basically their shoe sales reps). These guys eat/sleep & dream about sneakers. He then played these videos showing these sneaker experts in different situations. I personally loved the one where a girl was whipping the sneaker expert with a different shoe each time. The sneaker expert was able to guess the brand of the shoe successfully without looking. Needless to say the videos went viral. Have a look at the video
Marketing Masters Adtech New Delhi
Similarly they have come up with a sneaker version of Wikipedia called (you can guess it) sneakerpedia. It is still in Beta. Idea is user generated content. Community of people who are crazy about sneakers. They advertised the website on traditional channels to get members to join & increase awareness of the site. It is a community space and not a marketplace. Have a look at http://www.sneakerpedia.com/beta
I am skipping a couple of sessions here as they weren’t that great or I ended up going for lunch. The next one I attended was by Wasim Basir from Coke. He actually comes up to stage & very passionately starts talking about what Coke is doing in this space in India. He talks about the campaign “Where will happiness strike next”. Special coke vending machines are placed in college campuses in India & a video camera records the results as the coke machine spews out free bottles of cokes. The emotions thus captured are priceless (got me thinking of the Mastercard campaign). Have a look at this video
He says Coke is not scared to experiment & thus they launched the Coke Shadow Ad first time in India online and not on TV. They did an SMS blast to 8 million people informing them that they can be the first to watch the video. Of course the video went viral. You can watch the Coke shadow video