Events companies are frequently seen as innovators in the world of social media and digital marketing. Brands often utilise Facebook event pages, digital ticketing and cross-platform promotional tools to enhance their event marketing. In this post I will explore the various ways different events companies utilise the image-based social media platform ‘Instagram’ to emulate the themes, ethos and ideologies of their events.

There are plenty of guidelines and tips offered to digital marketers looking to utilise Instagram. Customer digital interaction specialists SEEN Digital Media advise brands to use a multitude of techniques to engage and interact with their audiences using Instagram. SEEN offer key digital marketing initiative ideas such as utilising the correct hashtags, following top trends, highlighting user generated content and running engaging contests. Each of these enable brands to enhance their social media presence and effectiveness using Instagram.

Nightclubs and event promotion companies already utilise Instagram to visualise their events, often posting event specific artwork, professional photographs and user generated content. The posts shared by the promotion teams through Instagram build a pictorial representation of a brand, providing a key visual engagement tool to their social media marketing campaigns.

A photo posted by WHP (@whp_mcr) on Dec 31, 2015 at 7:56pm PST

The Warehouse Project in Manchester utilise their Instagram to share professional photographs from their events and to promote event artworks. Personally, I think their Instagram lacks innovation. It represents what they do as an events brand, it’s very industrial and aesthetically pleasing but it could be more engaging. Although they’ve emulated their industrial ethos through the images posted, they don’t utilise user generated content as effectively as they could. 

A great example of a company utilising their Instagram page to emulate their ethos is event ticketing company Eventbrite. They share various images from the events hosted on their website, they also provide a behind-the-scenes look into their operations alongside sharing playful images such as a dog in a hat to celebrate #NationalHatDay! – Eventbrite have offered some useful tips to utilise Instagram to promote events, they can be found here. 

A photo posted by @eventbrite on Jan 15, 2016 at 3:09pm PST

Playful images clearly are effective promotional tools for events, Instagram can be used to share a multitude of content such as photos, memes, gifs and videos. Competitions are also widely used by events companies to promote specific events. Here’s an example of an effective contest offered by Hospital Records winners of the Drum&Bass Arena award for the “Best Club Night” (for the fourth year running!).

FREE STUFF!!! Get involved over at the Hospital Shop while stocks last

A photo posted by Hospital Records (@hospitalrecords) on Jan 25, 2016 at 5:01am PST

Event planners Todd Events are internationally renowned for their party planning, production and creative skills. They utilise their Instagram to emulate their ethos of world class decor and design, sharing images of elaborate event installations and beautifully orchestrated designs. They boast 22.1k followers on Instagram and the interaction with their images is huge. Their event planning skills are utilised by celebrities who further promote their services through their individual Instagram accounts. Their social reach is vast and extremely effective. 

A photo posted by @toddevents on Jan 1, 2016 at 3:43pm PST

Instagram can be used to promote events in all manor of ways, some much more effectively than others. Generally the visual engagement with a brand is based on the aesthetic value of the images shared. The overall quality of event production can be beautifully emulated through Instagram but be warned; laziness shows, just sharing poster artwork images and a few event images won’t suffice. Brand experience is key, “Brand experience has a positive impact on brand personality and brand personality in turn affects brand reputation” (Vila-López & Rodríguez-Molina, 2013).

The most effective use of Instagram by events brands is through the utilisation of various initiatives and the strict following of guidelines that have been set out by the likes of SEEN and Eventbrite. A strategic approach to Instagram allows brands to truly emulate their ethos using visual marketing techniques. It is imperative for brands to stand out from the crowd, as Thornton Wilder famously said, “In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.”

References 

Hirschman, E.C., 1986. The effect of verbal and pictorial advertising stimuli on aesthetic, utilitarian and familiarity perceptions. Journal of Advertising,15(2), pp.27-34.

Vila-López, N. and Rodríguez-Molina, M., 2013. Event-brand transfer in an entertainment service: experiential marketing. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 113(5), pp.712-731.

http://blog.seenmoment.com/instagram-marketing-tips-from-the-best-brands

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t/thorntonwi162984.html#LqAkXlmilosX5MC5.99

http://www.eventbrite.com/blog/ds00-promote-your-event-with-instagram/

A vast amount of time and effort is spent by brands attempting to merge digital and physical marketing techniques. The ways that Spotify has managed to take a step out of it’s digital platform to engage directly with music fans at a festival are explored here. Outlined in this blog are the objectives and tools utilised by Spotify to better-engage with its audience, and the outstanding results they gained on completion of the campaign.

Spotify began to build a bridge between online customers and music fans attending festivals a few years ago. They have been working for a number of years to organically fuze musically interested festival-attendees with their digital music streaming platform.

Spotify have produced various reports and case studies regarding their work with international festivals. Notably, in 2014, Will Page, Head of Economics at Spotify produced a case study called ‘Adventures in the Lowlands‘ this study explored ‘Festivals, Streaming and Social Media’ offering best practice tips for areas such as integrating data, social media, measuring uplift and surveys.

At Bilbao BBK Live, one of the biggest music festivals in Spain, Spotify teamed up with two event digital technology specialists, Glownet and Yumiwi to produce an interactive campaign like no other. Glownet, who are currently revolutionising the events industry with their high-tech RFID (radio-frequency identification) systems, principally focussed on international music festivals. Yumiwi are a digital engagement company who hone in on utilising data analytics within event/festival marketing activation.

All three of these organisations involved are experts in their fields, pardon the pun, they know music fans, festival-goers and most importantly collectively they know how brands can meet their consumers’ expectations.

Spotify Experience BBK Live 2014 from YUMIWI on Vimeo.

The campaign objectives were extremely demanding (Glownet.com, 2014): Register 3,000 new users, create upwards of 1million impressions, 6,000 likes/comments and at-least 1,000 playlists and photo shares. Although the bar was set high, this didn’t prevent the innovative campaign from over-performing; astonishingly the results actually tripled their original targets.

“47 brand impressions per second”

Overall the BBK Festival campaign was a huge success for Spotify, Glownet and Yumiwi. They managed to gain over 6,700 new customers , 18,000 likes/comments, 4.3 million digital impressions,  3,100 Spotify playlists and 2,300 photos shared via social media. This hyperbole of digital activity ended up creating over 47 brand impressions per second.

The experimental marketing concepts that were jointly delievered by Glownet, Yumiwi and Spotify were made up of various deliverables;

• Selfie-Stand totems that were remotely positioned across the festival site.  Customers were able to take selfies and then apply instagram-style filters. Each image had an overlay of Spotify’s logo. By tapping their RFID wristbands on the totem scanners, festival-goers were able to simply upload images to their Facebook profiles.
• Playlist Check-In totems that were emplaced at the festival’s main stages, allowing newly registered customers an opportunity to check-in whilst their favourite acts were playing on stage. Customers could then share the playlist they’d just created via social media, simply by tapping their RFID wristbands on the playlist stations.
• Post-festival, customers received individual customised playlists based on the artists and stages they watched at the event, personalising the experience to each customer.
• Spotify premium accounts, samsung speakers and cameras were all offered as incentives to encourage customers to engage in the campaign. Festival-goers were able to win prizes dependant on the performance and engagement levels achieved by their Facebook posts.

Music festivals are known to be advanced in their digital marketing techniques, according to Mark Walker, Head of Content at Eventbrite.com, “music festivals are leading the way when it comes to paid promotion compared to the rest of the events industry” – see the full article here

Although this campaign seems to have been effective in gaining customer interaction with Spotify,  I think it would be hard for other smaller brands to engage with audiences as readily and easily. Spotify are one of the most well renowned music streaming brands to date, therefore engagement levels are expectedly higher than those of lesser known, smaller digital brands attempting to interact with their consumers in the flesh.

References

Anderton, C., 2011. Music festival sponsorship: between commerce and carnival. Arts Marketing: An International Journal, 1(2), pp.145-158.

http://glownet.com/tag/spotify/

http://glownet.com/announcing-glownet-and-yumiwi-partnership/

Game of Thrones is distributed to over 170 countries worldwide and is currently the most popular and talked about TV show globally. Here I will be using a case study to explore the social media marketing technique used by some of the leading digital and advertising agencies within New Zealand. Their aim was to promote ‘Game of Thrones – Series 4’ to a new audience, those who had dismissed the series stating it ‘wasn’t for them’. With the fast approaching launch of GOT series 4, SKY saw an oppertunity to capitalise/monopolise on a new audience and they approached DDB with the brief:

‘to create a tactical campaign on a relitively small budget that would convice New Zealanders to SKY and/or SOHO’

DDB worked alongside Brandwatch to anayalise social media to identify key themes within the show – They found that King Joffrey was the topic of focus for a lot of the online conversations, his character drove the most passionate commentary – King Jeffrey is a hated across the world. What better way to engage a new audience than to empower the people? They decided to quite literally bring down the King with the power of social media.

DDB decided to relate King Jeffrey to other worldwide leaders(mainly dictators) who had been famously toppled around the world (think Saddam Hussein). – they commissoned a 7 meter high statue of King Jeffrey with a huge noose around his neck and placed it atop of a plinth in the world famous Aotea Square. They then encouraged fans to use the hash tag #bringdowntheking to turn the winch on the top – DDB live-streamed the whole affair online and eventually after a few days the statue of King Jeffrey was toppled live to the world.

The use of powerful and political current issues within the social media marketing domain is proven here to be highly engaging for audiences – this somewhat relates to the phenomena of sharing political messages through social media. If you look to the arab spring – you can see the way they promoted their message through the use of social media was highly effective and gained global attention. This idea can be approached by marketers through the use of current issues but i would issue caution for them to not over step the mark.