One of the brilliantly executed real-time marketing examples till date wasn’t even a commercial – it was a mere tweet from Oreo during a blackout at the Super Bowl event in 2013. Oreo seized on the opportunity during the thirty-four minute hiatus of the games to market their famous cookies with a simple tweet message- “Power out? No problemâ€? along with an ad caption saying ‘you can still dunk in the dark.’ It is quite surprising to know that the graphic released during the blackout was designed, captioned and approved within minutes. And the end result was unprecedented – Oreo’s message was retweeted more than 10,000 times in just one hour!

Within minutes, several other popular brands such as Audi, Walgreens and Tide too “news-jacked� the blackout to promote their own products.

Since the success of this real time ad during the Super Bowl event, leading brands have made their best attempts time and again to emulate the Oreo campaign, some tasted success while others failed miserably. The Oreo campaign was so popular that whenever any other campaigns engaged social media platforms to connect a real-time event, it seemed like an obvious copy. This could be attributed to the fact that today’s marketers are simply trying hard to go viral and not focusing on the true nature of real-time marketing.

2013 was the year loaded with bagful of real-time marketing examples. However, in the present scenario, there’s a growing debate around the concept of real-time marketing – whether it will remain here or not in the coming years. In this article, we briefly discuss this topic and highlight the key differentiating factors of a real time marketing campaign.

Traditional Vs Real-Time Marketing:

A traditional marketing campaign is a rigid model consisting of a bunch of Ad units that are created at a certain point in time and generally don’t adapt to emerging themes in culture or the recent happenings around the world. These advertising campaigns are planned well in advance and seldom leave any room for improvisation.

In contrast, a real-time marketing campaign suggests that content has to be produced and delivered in a continuous stream rather than through a laborious, slow-moving process of months of campaign development.

Key success factors for Real time marketing:

Recently, the Harvard Business Review featured an article stating that “advertisers should act more like newsrooms“. It was not an easy feat for Oreo to mobilize a centralized group working with multiple offsite teams to upload content, respond, and track and measure results. It was indeed a well-planned improvisation to engage in real-time. To pull off a real marketing campaign of such a distinction achieved by Oreo, the key success factors include:

1. Forward thinking organization

A real time ad campaign requires a war-room kind of a setup, where an ad graphic can get approved instantly. Hence, organizations must have a good alignment with multiple partners or other agencies.

2. Clear understanding of Brand and its audience

Both flexibility and a focus on staying on brand are the key ingredients to produce creative content with the aid of smart usage of a local or current event. It need not to be witty or a viral content but must be relevant to your brand and target audience

3. Scope for improvisation

Once the planning is in place for a newly launched ad campaign, teams must possess the ability and permission to improvise it when they see the right opportunity. Therefore, working in silos is not appreciated.

Future of Real-time marketing:

Real-time marketing is simply an evolution of marketing triggered by modern day behaviours. We belong to an era of instant gratification where people want updates, facts, marketing reports on the spot. For a successful real time marketing campaign execution, marketers must focus on stirring up real conversations about topics that are relevant to both to their brand and its audience, rather than simply going viral or increasing the re-tweets and likes.

We at Glocaledge, feel that real-time marketing concept will be trending in 2014 and we will watch more such innovative campaigns that were launched by Oreo and others in the past. In other words, though some of the aspects of real marketing may be a passé but the overall concept is here to stay!

Image credits : Twitter