Sav Evangelou Adtech Delhi
Brands have to earn the right to play a role in people’s lives
Many keynotes later, ad:tech Delhi is drawing to a close. After some amazing insights, heavy stats and insightful case studies, it’s the one of the last Keynote presentations of the event and it has Sav Evangelou, the Executive Creative Director of Digitas up on the podium. This has to be one of the more interesting keynotes since Sav turns out to be a very effective presenter and has a bunch of content to keep the audience interested. Sitting up in rapt attention, I listen as he speaks about how brands need to have conversations with their customers. (I so agree!) . He continues saying that interruption advertising is diminishing in effect because people have been conditioned to get what they want when they want. So Sav says that due to this, brands have to re-evaluate their view of interruption advertising to create reasons for brands to be engaging. Interestingly Sav comes out with a list of top ten tips to help brands find a role in people’s lives and backs them up with some examples. He goes through them in a reverse order ( kind of reminds me of a rocket launch countdown) . I don’t think I am going to get through the entire 10 so here are a couple of tips:
The first tip (or rather 10th tip since he is doing a reverse count) is, “Listening harder allows you to get closer to your customer”. For example, Ariel UK they created a website that answers questions on laundry. This created some good buzz amongst its customers along with a very vital brand connect and this also helped Ariel differentiate itself from the competition.
Sav also shared for the benefit of the Indian audience that in India the average CTR is .18% which means that 99.82% of people don’t click on the ads. Now if that stat has you scratching your head in disappointment, you shouldn’t because a Head and shoulders ad achieved a 100% CTR (I tried searching but couldn’t find that particular ad). He also speaks about a very tongue in cheek Land Rover ad which is about a football player vs. a rugby player (must watch!) which went viral and got more than 116,000 views and counting.
Viral YouTube Ads and videos from major brands
Nissan – Another auto brand he spoke about was Nissan which created a campaign around the Nissan Juke. I found this campaign interesting since it was a rebranding campaign aimed as repositioning the Nissan Juke as a runabout for the youth as opposed to the older model which was targeted towards a more mature audience. This campaign was aimed at musically inclined people and allowed these budding musicians to compose their tune and then based on people’s voting, the best one would be selected out of a top 10 and get a chance to get his or her music track professionally produced and launched at a concert with La Roux (a popular band in the UK). The smart association of music and youth created oodles of positive buzz via blogs, websites and social media around the Nissan Juke and contributed to strong and robust sales numbers for the Japanese carmaker.
Lacoste – Speaking of repositioning brand and their products, Sav spoke about Lacoste which again is a brand associated with a mature audience but wanted their latest fragrance L.12.12( yup they make perfumes too. Not just tees) to be popular with the youth. To do just that Lacoste made a Viral YouTube video that featured a series of videos around the spotting of a crocodile in public places round London. This campaign was immensely successful and succeeded in getting positive buzz and established a vital brand connect with the youth around the Lacoste’s L.12.12 fragrance.
Snickers – In case by now you are feeling hungry, then the next example will probably increase your hunger. Popular brand Snickers wanted to create a campaign that focused around energy and around its Male audience. Since it missed out on sponsoring the major football teams, it decided to create a football match of its own which would be an entry into the Guinness Book of World records for the longest football match in the world. Sav shared the ad (Step up to make football history) which went viral (and why not!). Snickers smartly used football along with the Guinness record to its advantage. They got loads of free media coverage (print, tv etc across Europe & Middle East) & generated lot of online buzz. In fact the entire match was live streamed on the Internet.
After those viral ads and creative insights offered by Sav it was time to bid adieu to adtech Delhi. Somehow it did feel odd that there wasn’t going to be any more sessions to attend and 48 hours went by like a breeze.
My impressions and viewpoints on ad:tech Delhi – So what did I think of the event? It was certainly well organized & they had a great speaker line up & some interesting panel discussions. I believe Social Media & creativity dominated the topics at the event. Being in the SEO space I would have loved to hear a lot more about Search Engine Optimization. But this topic hardly came up. Even in the two panel discussions that were supposed to be about this topic it got clubbed in with PPC.
However given that Social Media is such a hot topic I enjoyed hearing from the entrepreneurs as well as evangelists in this space. Being an optimist I believe every cloud has a silver lining & the way I look at this is that it isn’t that bad that they didn’t cover the SEO topic in detail. In case you are hungry for SEO know how, tips, advice or strategies, Bruce Clay will be conducting SEO training in India from 2nd August to 4th August 2011. We will definitely be there and hope to see you there too.
Please note: Credit for all the photos go to the photographer Naina Redhu.