Cue the time machine: Long before smartphones, selfies, and our unquenchable online sharing culture, photos were the best mementos we had when returning from vacation. We shared prints with family and friends, pasted them in photo albums and loved showing off the fun we had during our travels. Universal Orlando’s “Show Us Your #UniversalMoments” campaign, with its tagline “Vacation like you mean it,” has captured this nostalgic sharing perfectly for our modern times. Their clever use of shared customer vacation memories offer marketing pros four user-generated content (UGC) tips to harness “universal” human behavior into marketing gold.   

Launched in April 2014, #UniversalMoments invited Universal Orlando visitors to upload their favorite photos and videos to Instagram, Twitter, Vine, or the Universal website accompanied by the hashtag “#UniversalMoments.” Since then, viewers have been sharing, downloading, and commenting, collectively building a vast catalog of UGC all about the fun times you can find at Universal Orlando.

Universal Orlando shares customer content on its website and social channels, including Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. And, many customer images were even used in a recent Universal Orlando TV commercial.

This UGC campaign works because it taps into basic “universal” human behavior.

4 universal UGC tips that tap into human behavior

1. Make your customers the stars

People love to show and tell vacay photos, especially the photos that capture the essence of the vacation, or the ones where we look our best, goofiest, or relaxed. #UniversalMoments allows visitors to pick the perfect photo and memory and share it with the world —hanging out with Scooby Doo characters to enjoying time with the family and riding roller coasters. True fans love seeing their photos on the website, and imagine the heightened excitement for those who had photos selected for the TV commercial.

2. Connect with human emotions

Universal doesn’t just post all the images on its site; it filters them into categories: excite, relax, play, connect, or thrills. This helps future customers hone in on what they want from their vacation and envision themselves at the park. As a bonus, these “vacation verbs” might inspire visitors to participate in other activities while at the park. By connecting with emotions of the customer they create a deeper desire to take action (book the trip)!

3. Give people a reason to share

We know people share their favorite images on social media, both while traveling and when they arrive at home. Through this campaign, Universal encourages their customers to tag those very photos with a simple hashtag, with the potential to be featured online. When someone’s images are showcased on Universal’s website, they are likely to share the campaign itself.

4. Use real people to tell a story

When we share our photos with friends, they enjoy it because they know us, they like us, and they are happy to see us happy. To our friends, we are real people, not just another model on location at a photo shoot in Florida. UGC used in this campaign manages to instill the same feeling. The photos that are submitted by customers are not professional shots; the people have not been cycled through hair, make-up and wardrobe, and they look like, well, real people. Real people bring authenticity to any marketing campaign.

Ultimately, what makes the #UniversalMoments campaign work is that customers become engaged through memories. Everyone wins;  those creating the moments captured in the images, the people sharing them with others, those who are planning their next vacation and Universal itself.

The post #UniversalMoments Campaign Reveals Four Universal UGC Tips appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.

This year, the most intriguing Super Bowl ad was from McDonald’s. Certainly, we all wish we had their budget, but regardless of spend, McDonald’s provided a lesson about extending ad campaigns through social engagement, which doesn’t have to extend the dollars.

McDonald’s “Pay With Love”

McDonald’s “Pay With Love” advertisement extended their TV ad into restaurants where customers could indeed pay with love. And as we saw, they then shared that experience with social networks.

But then McDonald’s added its proactive extension to the campaign by announcing on their social channels they would be giving away one of everything advertised during the Super Bowl. All fans had to do to enter was retweet their posts about each of the other sponsor’s commercials.

While the two ideas could have existed separately, the “love” being paid by the brand did connect the ad with the social extension of the giveaway.

Extending an ad campaign doesn’t have to be done solely with hashtags. In 2008, I helped extend Jim Beam’s first television commercial in a decade with a video contest that garnered a Sammy Award the following year.

We took the commercial concept, a humorous parody of the perfect girlfriend, and challenged brand fans to create their own version of the perfect girlfriend or boyfriend. We gave them access to graphics, fonts, and even sound bytes from the original ad and challenged them to film a new iteration.

That effort resulted in a nearly six-month extension of a relatively short television media buy, over 500 content video entries and over 90 million online brand impressions through website visits and social shares.

The Key To Extending Your Advertising

While ad campaigns can live on in social and other avenues of online content for weeks, months and even years, there needs to be an intention behind it in order to be successful. Fans won’t just like your television, print or even radio ads and talk about them — at least not on the vast majority of cases. It’s when you devise a plan to extend the campaign that true virality happens.

As you plot your next ad campaign, ask the following questions to help inform your efforts to extend through social platforms:

• Can we motivate our fans and followers to add to the campaign through ideas, images or other assets?
• Is there an idea or platform larger than our brand that people will identify with and interact
• If people follow our persuasion in this campaign, is there something we can do to reward them?
• Can we tie purchases to a matching charitable effort?

The more you can develop advertising campaigns that have a natural engagement point beyond the ad, the easier extending the idea to the social web will be. The trick is looking at the campaign as more than just ads. Step back and think about extending the message and storyline to many channels. Sure, you can start with a hashtag idea, but don’t stop there. The only limits are your imagination.

The post Extending Ad Campaigns Means Extending Your Thinking appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.

When David Berkowitz declared the “The Beginning of the End of Storytelling” in Ad Age, the advertising executive told five separate stories to make his point. As CMO of the ad agency MRY, Berkowitz was telling his own ‘brand story’ in arguing that ‘storymaking’ is future of connecting with people (MRY does storymaking). Berkowitz is on to something, but I don’t think storymaking will oust storytelling. The two strategies are inseparable.

The Basics of Storytelling Versus Storymaking

Let’s start by clarifying our terms: ‘storytelling’ is when marketers create and distribute content about their brand. Every piece of content made or paid for by the brand – a TV ad, a blog post, the tags on a pair of jeans or the copy on a carton of coconut water – are all stories. The name of the brand, what it is and what it does are all made up from scratch.

‘Storymaking’ is the process of making the brand’s audience the storytellers. This isn’t an entirely new concept. Testimonials, reviews, Tweets, Instagram photos and many other forms of user-generated content (UGC) can fall under this domain. The difference with storymaking – versus a generic Facebook post about a brand – is that marketers actively solicit, curate and redistribute the stories made by their audience.

Storymaking is the answer to years of research that deem word-of-mouth (WOM) the Holy Grail of marketing. WOM took center stage in 2013 when Nielsen reported that 84% of consumers say they trust word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family above all other sources of advertising – branded websites, the second most trusted source, trailed WOM by 15 percentage points. Marketers have repeated and re-invoked this statistic more often than any other that I’m aware of.

If people trust recommendations from friends and family more than a brand’s content, marketers reason that people also place more trust in content generated by peers on social media, even if they’re strangers. In March 2014, research released by Crowdtap and Ipsos helped confirm this idea, finding that the Millennials say UGC is more memorable, more trusted and more influential in purchasing decisions than any other media. In essence, storymaking is a version of WOM marketing in which brands take a very active role.

To Make Stories, You Have to Tell Stories First

Storymaking relies on turning audience members into storytellers. However, to spark participation, collect UGC, curate it and re-distribute it, marketers still need to tell stories.

Think about how Bud Light (a Thismoment customer) took over Crested Butte, Colorado, renamed it “Whatever, USA” and then invited 1,000 people to attend a weekend-long party. The first step was telling the #UpForWhatever story, which began with Bud Light’s 2014 Super Bowl commercial. The real-world stunt showed that being #UpForWhatever means being spontaneous and embracing the unexpected, whether it be Don Cheadle with a lama or a “tiny tennis” match with Arnold Schwarzenegger. It demonstrated that Bud Light will take a random person like Ian and put him through a spontaneous, unforgettable night – because that is what Bud Light is all about.

Without this initial story – staged and told by the brand – the march towards Whatever, USA couldn’t have succeeded the way it did. When Bud Light asked its audience to audition for the weekend in Whatever, over 100,000 people submitted audition videos because they already understood that #UpForWhatever meant a chance to have a weekend at least as epic as Ian’s night. In other words, the invitation to storymaking is great storytelling.

The Final Product Also Requires Storytelling

In traditional word-of-mouth marketing, brands are cut out of the production stage. When I tell my friends that this coffee shop I’m typing in makes the best coffee in Utah, that’s it. The coffee shop can’t vet, curate and redistribute my words. A key difference with storymaking is that the brand gets permission to use UGC and then present it to an audience in final form. To make this final product engaging, the marketers have to include a story about the process and intention of the storymaking.

To illustrate this concept, let me direct you to UPS’s Wishes Delivered page and Michael’s Make it Merry page (both Thismoment customers). On Wishes Delivered, UPS leads with a video and some text framing the story of Wishes Delivered. UPS is in the business of delivering goods that fulfill people’s wishes – if you share your wish with #WishesDelivered, they’ll donate $1 to a charity partner. The storymaking – people’s wishes – don’t make sense without this storytelling that contextualizes who, what, when, where, why and how. Dido with Michael’s Make it Merry page – the introduction explains that the holiday crafts tagged with #MadeWithMichaels are all projects created with material’s from Michael’s – the company is curating and presenting these images to inspire your own DIY holiday projects.

As storytellers, marketers must explain the motivation and process behind their storymaking. Why are you asking people to submit content? What does the final, curated content mean? Who benefits? How do I participate?

Tell and Make

While storymaking may be a more engaging way to share a brand’s story and connect with an audience, you can’t get around storytelling. There are no participants for storymaking until marketers have invited them with a compelling story.

More than half the battle in storymaking is winning over an audience. Why should I participate in this campaign? Why should I add your hashtag to my photos? Just like Bud Light’s Super Bowl commercial, your storytelling has to answer this why (we’re going to bring you to the party of your life) – then, what and how are pretty simple. Like UPS and Michael’s did, marketers must also tell the story of storymaking (read that carefully) in their final product, otherwise it won’t make sense.

So don’t ditch storytelling. Use it on its own – especially if you need to write an article about the downfall of storytelling – and use it to succeed at storymaking.

The post Storytelling or Storymaking? Your Marketing Needs Both appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.

If you break marketing down to its end goal, the primary objective is to sell. Just like sales and finance teams, marketers are after the holy grail of business – the all mighty dollar. While most will agree that this is true, they’ll also agree that today marketing is also about engagement and sharing. The best marketers understand the history that moved marketing towards today’s engage, share and buy model, how customers have evolved with media and technology and they understand how brand storytelling moves them towards action. Marketing programs that focus on engagement, sharing and then the sale have bigger, stronger and faster campaigns.

Let’s start with a story of how marketing worked in the 70’s

When I was about 7 years old I wanted to be Steve Austin, the “Six Million Dollar Man.” I’m pretty sure this was true for most kids my age, he was the coolest of the cool. If you’re not familiar with this AMAZING TV show, have a look at the intro, you’ll understand after you watch it – Go ahead, I’ll wait.

You see, Steve was everything I wanted to be: handsome, athletic and an astronaut who’s so valuable to the world that when he gets hurt they don’t just let him die, they REBUILD him. They make him bigger, stronger and faster; he becomes the world’s first bionic man.

As a twig skinny non-athletic child, I emotionally connected to Steve because he defined cool. However, I was a smart kid, I knew that I would never be that cool.

No one is, right?

That’s what I thought, and then I saw this:

If you’re like me, or at least the 7 year old me, what you see in this commercial is a boy who is transformed into Steve Austin when he ties on his magical new Zips shoes. This seemingly bionic boy in Zips is suddenly bigger, stronger and faster. And when he jumps, it’s so high “he might not ever come down.” My new mission in life was to get these shoes.

Why did this ad work so well?

Two reasons: disruptive advertising and brand storytelling.  The two combined had me begging for the shoes.

1: Disruptive Advertising: They got to me where I consumed media

At the time I saw this commercial disruptive marketing worked, really well. The brands with the biggest pockets engrained themselves into our brains through intrusive billboards, TV and radio spots and magazine ads. As consumers we could not avoid the ads because they were front and center in our everyday lives, we could not fast forward past them or change the settings in our browsers to keep them from popping up. We were stuck with ads and readily accepted it because they represented the personal cost of media consumption.  Storytelling was used purely as a means to get a sale and advertisers told mini stories that moved us to buy… Now!

As I sat and watched cartoons I had no choice but to watch the ads as the show paused for “important messages from sponsors.”

2: Brand Storytelling: Zips connected emotionally

As reported by Psychology Today, our emotions have a lot more to do with what we buy than we might like to think. While most of us would like to believe that we make our purchase decisions based on our needs and carefully evaluated analysis of product benefits, more often than not, we buy because we want to, because of how the purchase makes us feel.

In the case of Zips, sure, they are blatantly selling; this is not what I would call a “brand ad.” But, they are clever and use subtle storytelling tools that are easily associated with Steve Austin:

• The music is very similar to the “6 Million Dollar Man” theme song, a song every fan knew well
• They use a sound similar to the “bionic sound” we heard when Steve Austin ran or did something bionic
• The actor they chose is not athletic, they are trying to appeal to the kids who want to be athletic, not the actual athletes
• The narrative transforms a boy into a super kid – and that is awesome

By hitting me where I consumed media and telling me a story that would resonate the Zips advertising machine built a story in my head that said I needed these shoes and moved me to action (AKA begging my Mom to get me the shoes!*).

Oh, how things have changed

As media choices expanded and evolved, so did consumer control over technology. Consumers rapidly moved from a time where disruptive ads were accepted to a time where they have seemingly unlimited control over their consumption of media. With this control came the ability to fast forward past ads and customize media to avoid advertising (mostly). Of course this created a problem for media and advertisers.

The clever marketers found new ways to wedge advertising into the lives of consumers, and they quickly became jaded. They learned to ignore traditional advertising.

Which leads us to present day.

Consumers now have so much control over their consumption of media that the marketing game leans in favor of permission based as opposed to disruptive advertising.

With consumers becoming more and more immune to blatant ads and selling, marketers need to think differently and create an emotional bond between brand and customer, similar to what I had with my Zips. Enter the age of brand storytelling.

Permission based marketing + brand storytelling = engage, share and buy

The brilliance of the combination of permission based marketing and great storytelling is that it matches both the needs of the customer, and those of the marketer:

• The customer finds a non-disruptive form of content seemingly accidentally as they consume media (permission based) and that content is both entertaining and it connects emotionally (brand storytelling). If all goes as planned, the connection is so strong that they will engage and/or share with friends. Over time, as their brand affinity grows so does the likelihood of a purchase.
• The marketer gets a brand impression that manages to build an emotional connection between the brand and their customer. That customer becomes an advocate of the brand by sharing the content with their friends and those friends do the same. Over time the viral impact of sharing and engagement lead to more buyers.

The rise of the jaded consumer and permission-based marketing has upped the importance of story and connection.

3 brand storytelling examples from brands that get it

Subaru

Subaru customers love quality and care about safety and family. With the use of two words, “they lived,” and powerful imagery of a wrecked car, Subaru built a story that connected with their core customer emotionally.  Over 200,000 fans of the brand have watched this video with chills ran down their spines.

John Lewis Department Store

Love is a universal story we all relate with on a deep emotional level. In the John Lewis commercial we meet a young boy and his pet penguin. As the story builds we learn that the boy’s mission is to find love for his friend, because it is what he wants most. Of course there’s a twist at the end, and I’m pretty sure everyone that watches this video responds with an “awwww” as the story wraps up. Sure, the ad ran on TV, but more importantly people love it so much that they took to the Internet to watch again and share with friends. To date the video has been viewed over 18 million times.

Honda

We all have a fantasy life, and this video lets Honda customers experience that life in an interactive, and very well done, video. As the video starts we see a man picking up his kids from school and driving them to a party. A pretty simple journey for sure. However, if we press down the “R” key on our keyboard we get to experience the “double sided story” which represents the fantasy life of an undercover cop working the night shift. This story expresses the fantasies we all have, and shows the versatility of the Type R Civic model. No surprise, fans connected with the video and it’s a fantastic example of brand storytelling.

Note: The embed version of this video does not feature full video functionality as described, for the FULL experience click here.

Focus on engagement, sharing and then the sale to make your marketing bigger, stronger and faster

As consumers become more and more jaded with advertising, marketers should be thinking about permission marketing, be it a video, traditional content marketing, social media or something we’ve never seen before.

Every brand has a story, and it is the job of the marketer to find a way to tell that story in a way that resonates with their customer. Subaru, John Lewis, Honda, Zips and hundreds of other brands are working every day to find ways to connect with their customers.

Sure, the ultimate goal of marketing is to sell.  But, if you think of the cycle as less direct, and more of a means to how marketing can lead to engagement and sharing, the sale will come.  

Engage, share and sale lead to bigger, stronger and faster marketing. 

*For the record, I did get a pair of Zips and I asked my Mom about it this past weekend. She said I truly believed they made me bigger, stronger and faster. It seems I would show my shoes to people and then demonstrate how fast they made me run. The storytelling worked and to this day I would love another pair, if only they made them in adult sizes…

The post Engage, Share and Buy – 3 Reasons Brand Storytelling Matters More Than Ever appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.