5 Clever Social Media Campaigns to Learn From

You don't have to be in the market for a Super Bowl ad to learn who the world's biggest marketers are. In fact, as a quick visit to Facebook illustrates, social media has a leveling effect: Whether you're Coca-Cola or Jones Soda, your Facebook page looks pretty much the same. Coke's billions won't buy a dedicated wing on Twitter, either.
With this in mind, the following social media campaigns from marketers big and small are designed to be idea generators. This isn't a ranking of the most effective social media campaigns of the year, but rather the ones that have the most to offer a small-business owner with big ideas and a not-so-big marketing budget.
1. Kraft Macaroni & Cheese's Jinx
Last March, the venerable Kraft brand launched an interesting campaign on Twitter: Whenever two people individually used the phrase "mac & cheese" in a tweet, Kraft sent both a link pointing out the "Mac & Jinx" (as in the childhood game Jinx.) The first one to reply back got five free boxes of Kraft Mac & Cheese and a t-shirt.
What you can learn from this: This is a very low-cost way to track down potential fans on Twitter. All you have to do is search a given term and identify two people who tweet the same phrase at (roughly) the same time. In return, you'll gain goodwill, a likely follower and probably some good word-of-mouth buzz on the social network.
2. Ingo's Face Logo
When Swedish ad agencies Grey Stockholm and Ogilvy Stockholm merged last year, they wanted to get social media fans involved. The two agencies asked fans to participate by signing into Facebook to see the new name. Every time new people logged on to the dedicated site, the logo added their profile picture. With every picture, the logo got a little bigger, until 2,890 fan photos comprised the full name, Ingo, over a four-hour period.
What you can learn from this: This is another inexpensive way to get fans literally enmeshed with the brand. Another alternative is to create a real-life mosaic based on pictures of your Facebook fans, a project that Mashable recently completed in its headquarters.
3. BlueCross BlueShield of Minnesota's Human Doing
What better way to illustrate the plight of the common man than an actual common man? That was the thinking behind a BlueCross BlueShield of Minnesota program last year that put Scott Jorgenson, a St. Paul resident, in a glass apartment in the Mall of America for a month. To demonstrate the recuperative effects of exercise, Jorgenson was put on a workout routine for the month that compelled him to exercise three to five times a day, in 10-minute spurts. In a social media twist, Twitter and Facebook followers dictated the type of exercise for each session.
What you can learn from this: Creating an event, especially one that involves social media fans, is an alternative to launching an ad campaign. Humanizing a problem for which your company provides a solution is also a good idea.
4. GranataPet's Foursquare-Enabled Billboard
Pet food brand GranataPet earned worldwide attention last year for its billboard in Agenta, Germany. This wasn't just any billboard, though. It was rigged so that if a consumer checked in on Foursquare, the billboard would dispense some of the company's dog food. Someone from Granata's ad agency filmed the billboard in action, and the video now has more than 50,000 views on YouTube (in various iterations).
What you can learn from this: In the social media age, a single ad or a single billboard can generate images, press and videos, but only if it's clever enough.
5. Reinert Sausages's Wurst-Face App
Another German brand, Reinert Sausages, transcended its roots with a clever Facebook app that lets users upload their photo and receive a "Wurst Face," a graven image of themselves in cold cuts. The name "Wurst Face" comes from the extra piece of sausage that kids get for free at the butcher.
What you can learn from this: If you can create an app that's social, fun and brand-appropriate, it will function more effectively than even a high-budget ad campaign.

Mobile Advertising Is The Baby Huey Of The Media World (And Apple Is Taking The Low Road)

Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by Frank Barbieri, a serial entrepreneur and sometime blogger. You can follow him @frankba.
I had dinner last week with a senior exec from a global advertising holding company who asked what I often get asked these days, “What’s going on with mobile advertising?” it’s a timely question as last week Apple announced they were lowering the buy-in price for iAds from $500,000 to $100,000 and increasing the publisher revenue share from 60% to 70%. The move seems innocent enough, but with a little inspection is actually very worrying for a segment still struggling to shake off its inferiority complex, and potentially chilling for many innovators and entrepreneurs.
You would think that the Flurry data posted late last year on exponential mobile adverting inventory growth late last year would correlate with an industry finally reaching maturity. But a couple weeks after that data posted I had a conversation with a Fortune 100 senior media buyer who became bearish on mobile ad spending in 2011.
This person has a total media budget in the tens of millions annually, and for the first time since she started buying mobile, she decreased her spend over the previous two quarters and expects to decrease even more in 2012. Why? Perceptual and brand attitudinal data consistently comes back as not even outperforming search engine marketing.
Mobile advertising has become the Baby Huey of the media world: it’s huge and lumbering, but not mature. Analytics, measurement and targeting have not caught up to where online is, exactly when we’re hearing inventory volume is set to surpass online. Neither Comscore nor Nielsen rank the top mobile apps like they rank the top online properties by category and unique users. Nor do they rank ad networks. Phone and operating system manufacturers as well as the carriers have created fragmented and feature poor cookie environments on phones. What is seen as standard operating procedure online, the use of cookies to target users and understand usage, is treated as heresy in mobile.
This lack of basic advertising infrastructure means it’s hard to manage and measure brand campaigns. Performance is a different story as you just spray massive volume and pay for the converted. But with brand advertising you have to tune the campaign to give the right audience the right message the right amount of times in the right context to move the needle on campaign objectives. All this becomes near impossible without the simple help of a cookie. Only in isolated cases is buying brand advertising on mobile valuable. For instance buying direct from content brands with huge audiences and registered targeting data, like Pandora and The Weather Channel. Or buying video where brand studies still consistently show attitudinal value. Otherwise it’s just too hard to buy quality at scale.
Look at the somersaults Millennial Media, the largest North American “independent” ad network undergoes just to try and replicate simple cookie functionality to target a unique user (from their S1 filing):

MYDAS then runs a proprietary set of algorithms to analyze multiple data points from the device, carrier and app to statistically determine, on an anonymous basis, the likely unique user of the device and the app requesting the ad.

Seriously. Enter hoop, commence jumping. Ad platform managers I’ve spoken with are now worried that even this will get worse as Apple deprecated unique phone identifiers in iOS 5 and is poised to cloak UDIDs from apps in iOS 6. This is one of the data points Millennial surely uses as do many ad platforms and it means there will be one less credible way to ensure a unique user is targeted. This means brand advertisers will again buy less at lower prices.
No doubt consumers have strong opinions about companies using and storing data on their phones, and they should have controls and transparency. But shouldn’t the browsers at least shoot for parity with the web? Isn’t that a better experience for consumers in the end? Where cookie infrastructure feeds a revenue model and users always have the option to turn cookies off. That revenue model in turn allows great content and apps to flow. Simple unique user targeting is foundational to online ad spending and in mobile we’re using magic potions to describe a “likely” unique user. Ad spend will never catch up to online with these constraints. That will eventually hurt developers and end users’ access to great content and apps.
Apple’s strategy now is to help itself while it hurts the industry. iAds can identify unique users through iTunes registration and maybe they’ll even reserve UDID information for themselves as a trusted steward of consumer privacy. It just so happens that that stewardship creates an unfair advantage in the ad network space where networks will have trouble competing. Machiavelli would have noted with glee the timing of the announcement and Millennial Media’s expected upcoming IPO.
Frankly Apple doesn’t care as much about advertising revenue as they do about happy publishers. As the lack of ad infrastructure depreciates the value of developer inventory, Apple is providing a life support alternative in the form of higher revenue shares. This is a short-term fix and bad for the industry as buyers like the one referenced at the beginning of this post want to see a vibrant ecosystem of sellers and selling technology to increase their spend to online levels. The move is bad for most publishers no matter what the revenue share.
Apple could have easily taken a position to build quality and value in the mobile brand advertising ecosystem by addressing the infrastructure problems rather than pretending that they alone can support the segment. As one platform product manager put it to me, They could have designed a “reliable, and privacy conscious third-party tracking mechanism” that all networks and developers could use. This would help networks and brands to better track and target users and ad usage across properties, web and app. It would lead to a well spring of new ad innovation on iOS devices. This would have started to build the infrastructure for brand buying at scale with confidence and credibility. Users would get higher quality advertising. Developers get more dollars and Apple wins by having happy developers.
What they did instead is tell advertisers they are slashing prices and opening up the bargain bin. And they told developers that they’ll be happy with the new benevolent ad dictatorship and sole innovator. Shame. Mobile advertising was very close to its Cinderella moment, and Apple just decided to keep the glass slipper and close the ballroom doors.

10 Ways to Market Like a Super Bowl Ad Agency

Finally, this year’s Super Bowl game was more exciting than the commercials. Although 60% of Americans state they would rather take a bathroom break during the game than watch the ads, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every year. Fortunately, the ads now live on the Internet well past their 30 seconds of fame.
This year, large corporations spent upwards of $3.5M for 30 seconds of  commercial time. This translates into roughly a cost of 3 cents to reach every viewer! In fact, in the last 10 years, Anheuser Busch has spent the most–$239M–for Super Bowl ads. Unfortunately, except for their "Weego" commerical, it seems that their ad agency’s creative department took this year off.
Small business owners don’t have millions to spend on Super Bowl commercials. Nonetheless, it's fun (and sometimes useful) to look at successful themes and tactics that Superbowl marketing campaigns used this year. Here are 10 ways you can mimic the top spenders:

1. Invoke nostalgia. Many commercials leaned heavy into the familiar trusted themes from the past. While it did seem strange that a Korean car company, Hyundai used the theme from the movie Rocky in its kick off ad, it was very effective (my son was whistling the tune well into the first quarter).  Honda showed Matthew Broderick skipping work for a "feel good" return to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Career Builder  played the theme from “The Odd Couple” in their ad. Retailer HH Gregg used the Beatles' iconic song “Help”.
   
2. Show a social conscience. First watch the Groupon Super Bowl ad from 2011 and don’t do that. Bud Light scored big by using the “Weego” rescue dog for a cute ad with a reminder at the end to help this cause.
   
3. Talk about your customers’ dreams. Many commercials tapped into what their customers dreamed about. Toyota Camry showed viewers the way they would reinvent things (Rain making us thinner or a DMV that actually gives good customer service.)  American Family Insurance predictably talked about "going to get your dream".
   
4. Tap into the American spirit of rebuilding. Bud Light told viewers that “Good things come to those who wait…good thing that those people don’t work here.” Best Buy featured people that are amazing innovators. Clint Eastwood narrated a Chrysler commercial reminding the audience that the worst of the recession is over. He reminded viewers that “it's halftime in America.” Eastwood continues that “this country can’t be knocked out with one punch and when we come back, they will hear the roar of our engines again...” Look for a politician to use this at one of their rallies.
   
5. Use current events. Maybe the Mayans were right about the end of the world in 2012.  Chrysler used this theme for their Silverado to the tune of Barry Manilow’s “Looks Like We Made It”. They included the iconic Twinkie that is rumored to last forever. In an election year, Pepsi’s "King’s Court Commercial" promised “Pepsi for All!” This may also ring true with the "Occupy" movement.
   
6. Don’t use the same theme forever. Go Daddy’s sexy ads  stopped being intriguing this year and the Coca- Cola commercials with the polar bears were mostly uninspiring.
   
7. Partner up (or better yet, relate your product to beer!) This year, GE partnered with Budweiser for an unusual mix. When people think about GE they typically don’t think about beer. It may not be a match, but the audience did take notice.
   
8. Use surprise slapstick. Stonyfield’s Oikos yogurt featured John Stamos getting head butted by an actress. It may not have worked if he headbutted her.
   
9. Continue online. Use social media tags in conjunction with advertising. Companies such as Audi (#SoLongVampires) and Bud Light (#MakeItPlatinum) were trending on Twitter. A few minutes after the Fiat Abarth commercial ad aired, I received an email from the company as reinforcement to watch the ad again and enter a new contest. Chevy featured its new car, the Sonic with its www.letsdothis.com campaign.
   
10.  Use Vampires. When all else fails, feature vampires in advertising like Audi. This is a safe bet since every hit movie or television show last year seemed to include them.
    

What were your favorite Super Bowl commercials? What can small business owners learn from big corporate ad agencies about marketing?
Image credit: Thinkstock