A handful of Thismoment team members were lucky enough to attend Most Contagious 2014 in New York and London last week. What’s Most Contagious? In the words of the event’s website, it is a “unique, hybrid event dedicated to dissecting the trends, technologies and creative thinking that are transforming how consumers behave and the way brands and businesses operate and communicate.”

The website further explains, “[Most Contagious] celebrates and showcases the biggest innovations, the most disruptive startups, the most impactful marketing, dissecting and decoding the impact these will have on the immediate future for brands and advertising.”

Ambitious. Audacious even. Based on an informal survey of our team, we’d say that Most Contagious measured up pretty well.

From Tower Infinity visioneers GDS Architects to the developers behind the dating app Tinder, the event highlighted a colorful and compelling set of individuals and companies making waves in their respective arenas.

The range of topics and takeaways was as diverse as the companies listed above. It’s always tricky distilling a day of thoughtful discussion into blog-friendly bullet points. And while this “shortlist” certainly won’t capture the energy of Most Contagious, here are some ideas to consider:

1. Storytelling isn’t easy. Brands are seeking out and evolving their voices more than ever. Differentiating is more difficult. New non-linear, real-time, cross-platform storytelling structures are emerging in response to technological and behavioral seachanges. For example, the mobile generation switches between devices and platforms 27 times per hour (Time Inc. study).

2. Good causes are good. Consumers are acquiring a greater sense of social responsibility. According to a Cone Communications report, 91% of people are likely to switch brands if another of similar price and quality supports a good cause.

3. Feed the eyes. The rise of social visual culture continues unabated. Video is king, and “the standard for brands to provide competitive, high quality snippets of entertainment…is higher than ever.”

4. Get personal. Context is truly becoming everything. Accenture reports that 61% of millennial shoppers would trade privacy for personalized offers from retailers.

5. The crowd is the key. Crowdsourcing is now a real, strategic lever for businesses. Gartner predicts that by 2015, CPG companies using crowdsourcing in marketing campaigns or new product development will boost revenue by 1% vs. competitors that don’t embrace crowdsourcing.

For a deeper dive into Most Contagious, we encourage you to peruse the complete 2013 report packed with great graphics and data here.

Kudos to Contagious, and their partner sponsors FleishmanHillard and The Economist, for an incredible event!

The post Catching the Most Contagious Fever: 5 Takeaways from New York & London appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.

Gamers have rallied to Rockstar Games’ “Grand Theft Auto V.” Despite fans’ enthusiasm for pillaging, mayhem-making and other misdeeds in GTA’s virtual world, they happily poured over $1 billion dollars into publisher Take Two’s coffers in just the first 3 days of the game’s release.

The notorious franchise’s long and colorful history, as well as a Metacritic score of 97 out of 100, helped to stoke demand. An estimated marketing spend of $150 million didn’t hurt.

With a budget the size of Los Santos, it stands to reason that Rockstar would throw a few greenbacks at online promotion. Anticipating a state-of-the-art digital campaign, I decided to take a quick tour of Rockstar’s online channels. A handful of things jumped out:

1. Copious content. From videos to downloadable desktop wallpapers and music preview streams, the GTA V website is bursting with glossy graphics and rich content. Plenty to keep the hardcore happy. The commerce component is low-key with no prominent calls to action. A discrete “Order” link sits on the edge of the main navigation. It appears Rockstar made a decision to serve fans instead of selling to them. Works for me, but they may have overdone not overdoing it.
2. Major mobile. Rockstar knows that their audience lives on smartphones and tablets, so they’ve delivered a responsive, quality mobile website experience. The navigation is clean and provides easy access to bite-sized, mobile user-friendly media. Sounds obvious, but most miss it.
3. Video is vital. Rockstar’s investment in video assets is paying off. Clocking in at a hefty ~5 minutes, GTA V’s “Official Gameplay Video” has notched nearly 30 million views. In fact, every GTA V clip is driving significant engagement. That said, Rockstar’s YouTube channel is surprisingly ho hum. For whatever reason, Rockstar opted for a generic YouTube channel instead of shaving off a sliver of their budget to create a more exciting brand experience like Ubisoft’s YouTube hub. The stock YouTube look is out of character and a missed opportunity.
4. Sort of social. On the one hand, GTA V is everywhere you’d expect. On the other hand, the programming and presence is oddly inconsistent. Take the world’s largest social network: with 4.5 million fans, the official GTA V Facebook page is in business. Or is it? We counted an introverted 8 posts over the last 11 days since release. You might be thinking that all of the action is over on the parent Rockstar page, right? Wrong. Pretty much the same rhythm. Does GTA have a split personality? At a minimum, the brand voice reads choppy. Social integration with the brand site is also marginal; the site’s bounty of content should be easily shareable.
5. Credit for clever. Apparently, GTA is now so big that it needs its own social networking site. Ahead of GTA V’s debut, Rockstar launched Lifeinvader.com, a parody network featuring characters and brands from the new title. While tough to gauge the site’s success, Rockstar gets a nod for creativity.

The post 5 Grand Theft Auto V Digital Marketing Hits and Misses appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.

This summer Intuit Small Business launched its most ambitious interactive campaign ever, “Small Business Big Game” (powered by Thismoment).

It’s big. How big? Try Super big. As in any small business can enter, and the winner gets an all expenses paid 30-second spot in version 48 of pro football’s crown jewel (yes, Legal reviewed this post). All told the program includes more than $25 million in rewards and offers for small businesses.

Intuit and the Small Business team have developed quite a reputation for their creative–and effective–online marketing. You may recall the popular “Love Our Local Business” contest they sponsored earlier this year.

If that campaign was a feather in their cap, then “Small Business Big Game” will be the whole aviary.
Why are we so confident? We’ve had the opportunity to enable each of the Intuit Small Business team’s last two user-generated content (UGC) campaigns with our digital marketing system. The team’s first foray into the UGC campaign format inspired an enthusiastic response. Intuit proved the value of giving their customers a voice.

What was even more impressive was the team’s next effort. By applying key learnings from the first campaign, they achieved a nearly 3X boost in entries with less promotional ad spend. The biggest factor was a streamlined entry submission flow. By focusing on the user experience and reducing the number of steps to submission, the team drove a significantly higher conversion rate.

They also cultivated the email contacts they collected in the first campaign, maintaining and building on those relationships.

Look for a more detailed analysis of Intuit’s online innovation in a future case study. In the meantime, we encourage brand marketers to go to school on Intuit’s real-time execution of “Small Business Big Game.” With a big game ad at stake and the Intuit team’s track record, count on engagement that just might make the big game look small.

The post Intuit Small Business Goes Big appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.

Does your brand have a content marketing strategy? How are mobile technologies influencing content marketing trends? How do marketers get exec support and funding for content marketing programs? How do they show success? 

In last week’s edition of Thismoment’s webinar series, Transform Your Content Marketing: From Brand Selling to Storytelling, Altimeter analysts and digital marketing thought leaders Rebecca Lieb (@lieblink) and Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) tackled these questions and more.

Lieb and Owyang defined 6 different models that marketing organizations could implement to support their content marketing efforts. (Thanks to @redbricksmedia for summarizing in this blog post.)

The webinar sparked an enthusiastic conversation in the Twittersphere:

Listening in on the #contentmarketing webinar w/ @lieblink & @jowyang. Content must be created in harmony among all departments. #TMWebinar
— kelly a kriegshauser (@kakriegs40) July 18, 2013

“A shift from ‘push’ to ‘pull’ marketing is imperative for brand survival.” #contentmarketing #tmwebinar @jowyang @lieblink @thismoment
— digitaldamsel (@digitaldamsel) July 18, 2013

Perhaps the most shocking revelation was this:

.@lieblink exposes @jowyang as “a gigantic zombie fan”! #TMwebinar
— Thismoment (@thismoment) July 18, 2013

Key takeaways included:

• Content initiatives are a significant investment
• An effective strategy requires holistic organizational change 
• Paid, owned & earned media must be integrated
• Marketers should beware shiny new channels and technologies
• Content marketing requires cross-functional coordination and participation

For a deeper dive into the insights offered by Lieb and Owyang, we invite you to watch a replay of the webinar in its entirety here. Enjoy!

The post Webinar Replay: Altimeter Thought Leaders Owyang & Lieb Teach Brands How to Transform Their Content Marketing appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.