Over The Last Few Months Weve Noticed A Rapidly Growing Trend Where Brands Are Investing Time And Money To Engage In Digi

Over the last few months we’ve noticed a rapidly growing trend, where brands are investing time and money to engage in digital platforms to help promote their products and connect with their consumer audience; you only have to look back to our recent blog on Audi who has embarked on an Augmented Reality mission! We have been tweeting and engaging with social media for a while now, but many are only just beginning to recognise the tool as a key requirement for the success of any brand. In an increasingly overcrowded market place it is fundamental to use online and social platforms, encouraging interactivity with your audience, otherwise you are likely to be forgotten about. Back in the day (around 20 years ago), research suggested that you would only need to see a brand about seven times in order to remember it from the top of your head; today that figure is 35, a staggering 5 times as much as before. That’s why we’re not entirely surprised by the increasing number of businesses turning to viral and digital marketing techniques to ensure that they don’t become the lost in the crowd…

Specsavers is partnering with Skype for what MarketingWeek describes as a ‘groundbreaking media first’ for their annual competition, ‘Spectacle Wearer of the Year’. The competition will see a number of avid spectacle-wearers turning to Skype, where they can enter the competition simply by taking a picture of themselves wearing their glasses from their webcams at home. Specsavers digital marketing director, Tim Langlois, hopes that the use of a ‘groundbreaking format, created by Microsoft Advertising, will generate the highest ever number of entries’. Although this doesn’t seem like the most exciting of competitions; it is still an interesting and unique approach!

Another campaign catching our eye comes from Nike, who revealed the first shot of their new England home kit on Twitter, with the help of Arsenal midfielder Jack Wilshere yesterday. The footballer, who is an ambassador for the brand, was invited by Nike to tweet a photograph  of a student at his old school in the national team’s shirt with the caption; ‘Like this kid, my England dream began here, so he was first in #the shirt - England’s new kit from @NikeFootball’. Until now the designs for the kit had been kept under wraps, but seconds after the tweet was sent, it had been retweeted by Nike to over 1.2million followers. If that doesn’t grab the attention of the many football-enthusiasts on Twitter, we’re not sure what will!

Last but not least we want to mention Ben & Jerry’s latest plans; to launch an interactive social media hub for fans in a push to recruit more brand advocates.  Unilever, who own the ice-cream connoisseurs, are well known for running tactical campaigns to promote social change and plans to use the platform to spur support for upcoming activity. The hub aims to give fans a broader view on what is being shared online, rather than restricting information to one social media platform at a time. Users will be able to access gathered updates from networks such as Twitter and Facebook from a single location. Very clever!

Although it’s great to see brands communicating with their market-base, using online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, it’s also refreshing to see brands looking for other ways to harvest the benefits of viral marketing. We’ll definitely be signing up in support of Ben and Jerry’s’ newest digital campaign – who doesn’t want to be involved in talking about ice cream all day?