Personalised ads and avoiding ‘creepiness’ in targeted advertising

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Targeted advertising is very useful from a business standpoint since it helps a company reach potential customers who (appear to) fall very much within its presumptive market segment (Farahat and Bailey, 2012). However, a balance needs to be struck between over generalisation and over personalisation. If the ad content is too personal it may be perceived as ‘creepy’, carrying with it a risk of ‘freaking out’ consumers; if its focus is too specific it runs the risk of its appeal being too narrow and thereby capturing only a limited proportion of the intended target demographic; too broad and the ad may be ignored altogether, or its impact diluted, with the product being pitched to a largely indifferent consumer populace. Personalising ads is therefore clearly a key element of targeted advertising, yet is fraught with problems.

Info-graphic demonstrating effectiveness of targeted advertising
Found at: http://www.callcredit.co.uk/media/1218294/targeted-display-advertising.jpg

 

Some ways advertisements are personalised

Before exploring the problems that can arise from personalisation in targeted advertising, it is important to briefly establish some of the channels in which targeted advertising can be utilised.

Targeting generally looks at behaviours, audience, time, and demographics in order to attract the consumers the ad is aimed at. Personalisation is useful to ensure that the ad is relevant to the user who sees it. This is achieved based on information given by the user to a company, information collected or inferred with ‘tags’, or found with data from a third-party (Davis, 2014 – provides a more extensive list of channels and types of targeted advertising).

Info-graphic on the effectiveness of re-targeting Found at: http://corp.wishpond.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/7-incredible-retargeting-stats.png

 

  • Retargeting – the primary channel for personalised advertising. This is when a company tracks the browsing history on their website (and can extend to emails) using cookies to base advertisements on. To avoid the risk of being creepy, companies often detail the use of cookies when users visit (although, Cranshaw, 2012 et.al suggest that Online Behavioural Advertising (OBA) disclosures need to be communicated clearly or they may go unnoticed). See Moth, 2014 to ensure retargeting isn’t intrusive.
  • Real-time bidding – a less personal form of retargeting that can be used to target more generic audiences i.e by demographic or geography and thus can be used to tailor an ad to a region by targeting IP addresses.
  • Social media advertising – popular social media sites such as Facebook have a lot of information on their users, thus they can utilise this information such as information users have inputted, interactions with others, pages they browse etc.

 

The problem

Because consumers have become more aware of targeted ads becoming increasingly personalised, concerns have been raised by a large majority that their privacy is at risk, rather than the concerns centring on whether ads are relevant to them. 

An online survey conducted by CloudSense found that 51% do not want more personalised ads. In another survey conducted by Razorfish Global Research, 77% of respondents believed their privacy was being invaded by targeted advertising.  The fact that a simple Google search on the creepiness of targeted advertising produces many results, as well as guides on avoiding targeted ads altogether, indicates that this is a large problem widely felt throughout the web. However, this may not just be a case of ads being too personal, it may just be a result of poor implementation, as suggested by Calvert, 2015.

Balancing personalisation and privacy

The matter of whether a balance between personalisation and privacy can be achieved has been the subject of considerable academic examination.

There are many academic articles which engage in debating the challenges arising from balancing OBA and privacy when using targeted advertising. Some offer suggestions or models on how to avoid perceived ‘creepiness’. For example, Toubiana et. al, 2011 suggest a targeted advertising system that aims to preserve privacy, while Haddadi et. al, 2011 present a model to address mobile advertising privacy concerns. On the other hand, Johnson, 2013 suggests how consumers could avoid targeted or personalised advertisements because of the privacy infringement, emphasising the importance of striking a balance between personalisation and privacy. In avoiding privacy infringements, Martin et. al, 2016 state that studies suggest transparency in data management practices can help to negate feelings of mistrust and violation caused by ‘creepiness’.

Many of the models given are complex and difficult to follow and thus there is no simple answer to balancing these two elements. However, there are some basic guidelines that can be followed.

How to properly use personalisation in targeted advertisements

  • Ask for permission – as suggested by Martin et. al, transparency by asking permission to track user information may help to reduce negative feelings. Be clear about the data being collected.
  • Don’t over-personalise – this may seem obvious, but as an example of this, the company Target predicted that some female customers were pregnant and also predicted when the baby was due by tracking purchasing patterns and targeted adverts accordingly. This is an extreme example; a practice that should be avoided at all costs. To ameliorate this obvious creepiness, they broadened their advertisements to not just include baby-related products.
  • Use less data – though sounding counter-intuitive, using less data when personalising may be effective in avoiding creepiness. Some personalisation can go a long way, but use of too much detail, such as the above example, may have the opposite effect.
  • Focus on information that people are fine sharing – Information such as facts like occupation, gender, City they live in are some examples that people may be fine with sharing and thus are more appropriate to use when thinking about personalised targeted advertising. But do bear in mind that privacy limits are subjective.

 

References

Calvert, G. (2015). Personalised ads are here to stay but brands must beware ‘freaking out’ consumers. [online] Campaignlive.co.uk. Available at: http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/personalised-ads-stay-brands-beware-freaking-out-consumers/1347792 [Accessed 4 May 2017].

Davis, B. (2014). A guide to personalised advertising online. [online] Econsultancy. Available at: https://econsultancy.com/blog/64859-a-guide-to-personalised-advertising-online/ [Accessed 4 May 2017].

DeAngelis, S. (2015). Targeted Marketing: Helpful or Creepy? – Enterra Solutions. [online] Enterra Solutions. Available at: http://www.enterrasolutions.com/2015/04/targeted-marketing-helpful-creepy.html [Accessed 4 May 2017].

Dooley, R. (2012). Three Ways to Avoid Creepiness. [online] Futurelab. Available at: http://www.futurelab.net/blog/2012/02/three-ways-avoid-creepiness [Accessed 4 May 2017].

Farahat, A. and Bailey, M. (2012). How effective is targeted advertising?. Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web – WWW ’12.

Faull, J. (2014). 51% of people don’t want personalised ads. [online] The Drum. Available at: http://www.thedrum.com/news/2014/06/06/51-people-don-t-want-personalised-ads [Accessed 4 May 2017].

Haddadi, H., Hui, P., Henderson, T. and Brown, I. (2011). Targeted Advertising on the Handset: Privacy and Security Challenges found in Müller, J., Alt, F. and Michelis, D. (2011). Pervasive advertising. 1st ed. London: Springer, pp.119-137.

Johnson, J. (2013). Targeted advertising and advertising avoidance. The RAND Journal of Economics, 44(1), pp.128-144.

Leon, P., Cranshaw, J., Cranor, L., Graves, J., Hastak, M., Ur, B. and Guzi, X. (2012). What Do Online Behavioral Advertising Disclosures Communicate to Users? Technical Reports: CMU-CyLab-12-008.

Martin, K., Borah, A. and Palmatier, R. (2017). Data Privacy: Effects on Customer and Firm Performance. Journal of Marketing, 81(1), pp.36-58.

Moth, D. (2014). Retargeting: how to ensure it is useful rather than intrusive. [online] Econsultancy. Available at: https://econsultancy.com/blog/64206-retargeting-how-to-ensure-it-is-useful-rather-than-intrusive [Accessed 5 May 2017].

Rajeck, J. (2016). Four ways to avoid ‘creepy’ personalisation. [online] Econsultancy. Available at: https://econsultancy.com/blog/68303-four-ways-to-avoid-creepy-personalisation/ [Accessed 4 May 2017].

V. Toubiana, A. Narayanan, D. Boneh, H. Nissenbaum, and S. Barocas. (2010). Adnostic: Privacy preserving targeted advertising. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, NDSS ’10.

Building a thriving online community and measuring success

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There are many factors that measure the success and benefits of having an online community and providing a platform for it to thrive, varying from the design of the website to active participation. This blog will focus on creating a community for a business rather than an individual creating a community, and will consider some factors that contribute to success and how to measure success along with the reasons for building a community.

The many contributing factors to success

Before anything else, it must be considered whether there is a desire for the proposed community to be built. Without desire for the community to exist, there can be no community and any attempt at building one will be a futile exercise.

Whether an online community is intended to have its own website or simply to be an appendage of one, the design of the website or provision of space for the community (i.e forum) is crucial to its success. Uniformity is important, therefore ensuring that a forum and the overarching website is attractive, easily accessible, and simple to navigate is vital to the performance of the website as a whole (Djamasbi et al., 2010); indeed, it is key for visitor retention, increasing visit frequency and duration, and, in the case of forums, for increasing the volume of contributions (See Hernandez and Sorman, 2012 on design of an internet forum).

Many studies have been conducted examining what makes a successful online community. Iriberri and Leroy (2009) explored the extensive research in this area, finding that online communities must be given a purpose in order to increase the chances of success, as well as integrating rituals and encouraging etiquette (Kim, 2000). Also important is motivating participation (Koh et al., 2007) and protecting the privacy of members (Leimester and Kremar, 2004). Iriberri and Leroy suggest that there is a life cycle of a community, and, by determining what point in the lifecycle (e.g. inception, creation, growth, maturity and death) the community is at any given time, it can be decided what design components are most relevant and necessary to be implemented at that point. Iriberri and Leroy further assert that implementing sound design choices from the various guidelines available at the right time is likely to maximise their impact to increase both participation and online community presence.

Life-cycle of an on online community (Iriberri and Leroy, 2009)

Garland, n.d. asseverates the importance of consistent and great content. Although Garland’s viewpoint is essentially focused on individual blogging, it can still be applied to businesses that might wish to produce their own content (articles) or promote good content creation. He also stresses that engagement with the community is important. Thus, if someone were to submit a comment, providing a response to that comment can instrumentally increase the online PR of a company (Wright and Hinson, 2008).

The value of specific features is another factor to consider, including what they actually add and whether they are necessary (Silverman, n.d.). Too many can cause needless confusion. Too few may lead to members becoming disinterested or finding difficulty in interacting with the community.  Thus, the aforementioned implementation plan for what is needed is key (suggested by Iriberri and Leroy). In helping to decide what is needed, community feedback can be helpful since users might request much-needed additional elements; such feedback ties in with, and is integral to, engagement.

Implementing too strict guidelines could discourage participation while adopting an overly moderate approach might result in low-quality posts or encourage the introduction of spam. A balance must, therefore, be struck. Moderation is needed in such communities, but as Silverman suggests, your members themselves may apply that for you by uniting against negativity, which, in turn, may serve to strengthen bonds between members and build a greater sense of shared identity.

Student Room – An example of a thriving online community. More examples

Tripadvisor – A thriving online community.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Measuring Success

It is easy to say that the way to measure success is the number of members in the community. However, if no one interacts or participates then the volume of members is worthless; the community would in effect be dead.

It is generally agreed that success is measured by the volume of members’ contributions and the quality of the relationships among participants. For example, Preece (2001) identified two groups: sociability (number of participants, messages per unit of time, satisfaction, trustworthiness, and reciprocity) and usability (volume of errors using interface, productivity, user satisfaction). Both categories should be observed to evaluate success.

A word of advice

It should be noted that it is not recommended that a community should be created to attract new customers. Whilst it is not implausible that this can be achieved (for example, by encouraging existing members to invite friends), its success is nevertheless highly unlikely; the primary advantage of using an online community is to increase customer retention through customer interaction and participation, thus deepening relationships and loyalty. The same can be said that online communities should not be the main platform for generating sales, boosting SEO, or used for short ad campaigns. Whilst some success may be found in using an online community for these reasons, there are much cheaper, quicker and more effective tools and techniques that can be used instead for each of these forms of digital marketing.

A further determinant of whether building an online community is a sound idea for any business venture is understanding what the business is trying to achieve and the type of community it wants. For example, a magic shop will have different needs to a football club; an individual will have different needs to a big company. Another consideration is to ascertain whether the community already exists while assessing competition is important. If another community already exists then what would a new one bring to the community or improve upon the other. Can the communities work together?

Takeaway

Building an online community is no easy task, but by looking at examples of success and following the appropriate guidelines, the process can be made easier. There is no one set way of doing it as each community will have a different demographic and will respond differently to certain things. If successful, it is an incredibly effective way to interact with customers, a powerful tool for customer retention and loyalty and a valuable asset for any company to possess.

 

References

Iriberri, A. and Leroy, G. (2009). A life-cycle perspective on online community success. ACM Computing Surveys, 41(2), pp.1-29.

Djamasbi, S., Siegel, M. and Tullis, T. (2010) ‘Generation Y, web design, and eye tracking’, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 68(5), pp. 307–323.

Garland, D. (n.d.). 12 Keys To Building Your Online Community. [online] The Rise to the Top. Available at: https://therisetothetop.com/davids-blog/12-keys-building-online-community/ [Accessed 11 Apr. 2017]

Hernandez, J and Sorman, H. (2012). ‘Designing a usable internet forum’ Ume˚a University Department of Applied Physics and Electronics

Kim, A.J. (2000). Community Building on the Web. Peachpit Press, Berkeley, CA.

Koh, J., Kim, Y.-G. and Bock, G.W. (2007). Encouraging participation in virtual communities. Communications of the ACM 50(2), 6.

Leimeister, J. M. and Kremar, H. (2004). Revisiting the virtual community business model. Proceedings of the Tenth Americas Conference on Information Systems, New York, NY, USA, August 2004.

Millington, R. (n.d.). Don’t Start An Online Community For Any Of These Reasons – FeverBee. [online] FeverBee. Available at: https://www.feverbee.com/worstreasons/ [Accessed 11 Apr. 2017].

Preece, J. (2001). Sociability and usability in online communities: Determining and measuring success. Behavior and Information Technology Journal 20(5), 347-356.

Silverman, M. (n.d.). 6 Common Mistakes in Online Community Development. [online] Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting. Available at: http://www.convinceandconvert.com/community-management/6-common-mistakes-in-online-community-development/# [Accessed 10 Apr. 2017].

Wright, D. & Hinson, D. (2008) ‘How Blogs and Social Media are Changing Public Relations and the Way it is Practiced’, Public Relations Journal Vol. 2, No. 2.

The major keys to success for online banner ads

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When surfing the internet, you can practically guarantee that at some point you will encounter some form of advertising, whether this be as targeted, individual specific, or open, more generalised advertisements. Within the proliferation of online ads, it is important that your business stands out among the rest in order for it to be successful. Success can be measured in various ways (e.g. click through rate) and achieved using numerous methods. There are many resources available online that give useful tips on good advertisement design to increase click-through rate.

Types of advertisement

How you approach the design of advertisements will depend on the type and purpose of the advertisement. For example, the design elements of a video ad will be different to those of a banner ad. For the purpose of this blog, the focus will be banner ads, looking in particular at the major parts/components of ad design that are purported to incentivise people to interact and increase click-through rates (CTR), and examining the risks of online advertising.

Lohtia et al (2003) examine and explore how elements included in banner ads utilise incentives and emotional appeals that affect click-through rates through the use of interactivity, colour, and animation. Bayles (2002) claims the latter does not enhance users’ memory, recognition or awareness of an ad and suggests that it is hard to create guidelines for the design of such ads. Notwithstanding, regardless of whether the ad is static or animated, there are many generic guidelines on design that expand upon Lothia et al’s findings.

So, what makes a good ad?

Of the many factors that go into the design of banner ads, there appear to be elements that are consistently suggested on various articles and blogs which may incline a user to click or interact with banner advertisements. It should be noted, however, that Deighton and Sherman (2001) suggest that even when ads do not elicit a click-through, they may still have persuasive value. Here are the top four tips:

  • Keep it simple. Futterman (2014), along with most others, advise that it is important to keep a banner ad uncluttered and simple so it remains appealing. Most users will only glance at the ad for a second; thus diluting its impact with information would be wasteful of both time and effort. It is therefore important to make good use of the space afforded to you. Aesthetics are important in attracting users, and, due to the limited space of banner ads, it is difficult to get a message across succinctly. Fonts, colours and images used are all important and should be chosen carefully (read more here).

    An example of a better ad design From: https://conversionxl.com/banner-ads-suck-boost-ctr/

    An example of bad ad desiFrom: https://conversionxl.com/banner-ads-suck-boost-ctr/

     

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • A clear call to action is another essential element in incentivising users to engage with the ad. It should be instantly apparent what will happen should the user click on the ad. An ad should explain clearly where the link will take them and the benefits of clicking the link so they understand what to expect.
  • A landing page that is similar in design to the advertisement. Linking to the call to action, it is important that upon clicking the link, the user lands on a page that looks similar to the ad to avoid confusion. This maintains brand consistency. In addition, the user should arrive at the page the advertisement states it should link to. For example, where an ad includes a link for a pair of shoes, when clicking that link, it should result in the user arriving at that item.
  • Staying relevant to the user. This is with reference to the customisation and placement of ads. If your ad for party hats appears on a funeral directory website, it is unlikely that a user will click on it as it would have no relevance to them. 58% percent of respondents to AdKeeper suggested that when ads aren’t relevant the likelihood of engagement was reduced. Thus, it is important to keep ads relevant to the user; this can be achieved through tracking cookies and behaviour based marketing.

Risks

From: http://www.business2community.com/infographics/effective-online-advertising-0996804#3Cfg4PozHdLVgLAm.97

When advertising online, understanding the risks involved is vital to creating effective advertisements. There are several risks that need to be considered. For example, it is vital that you are advertising in the right places to ensure that your ad is seen because, astonishingly, half of all paid online ads are never seen. Further, the AdKeeper survey provides many reasons as to why people don’t click online banner ads. In one case, 43% of respondents stated that the ads don’t seem interesting or engaging. This emphasises the importance of good advertisement design.
Another issue is the prevalence of ‘bots’ in ad fraud, and it is advised that you should learn how to prevent this from happening to you. Additionally, the increased usage and impact of ad-blockers (Rudolph, 2016) may be detrimental to effective ad campaigns. These factors, along with costs of designing ads and purchasing ad space, must be given due consideration.
There are also dangers when using targeted advertising since such ads can be perceived as creepy. This can be avoided by not being overly personal and instead keeping content more generalised whilst staying relevant to the user.

Takeaway

Overall, the design of an ad is crucial in convincing a user to click through. Keeping it simple, relevant, useful and focused (in addition to being aware of the various risks around online advertising), should enhance the chances of a successful ad campaign.

References:
Adkeeper (2011) Top Reason Users Don’t Click Banner Ads: They Don’t Want to Be Diverted From Their Current Online Activity. Available at: http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/top-reason-users-dont-click-banner-ads-they-dont-want-be-diverted-from-their-current-1504178.htm (Accessed: 24 February 2017).
Bayles, M.E. (2002) ‘Designing online banner advertisements: should we animate?’, CHI ’02 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, , pp. 363–366.
Cousins, C. (2015) Design Banner Ads That Don’t Suck: 15 Design Tips. Available at: https://designshack.net/articles/graphics/design-banner-ads-that-dont-suck-15-design-tips/ (Accessed: 23 February 2017).
Deswal, S. (2015) ‘Banner ads suck (and how to make them convert better)’, conversionxl, 21 August. Available at: https://conversionxl.com/banner-ads-suck-boost-ctr/ (Accessed: 24 February 2017).
Futterman, E. (2014) How to design banner ads that people actually want to click. Available at: https://thenextweb.com/dd/2014/01/07/design-banner-ads-people-actually-want-click/ (Accessed: 13 February 2017).
Lant, K. (2017) 15 banner ad design tips to get more clicks – 99designs Blog. Available at: https://99designs.co.uk/blog/tips-en-gb/14-design-tips-for-more-clickable-banner-ads/ (Accessed: 26 February 2017).

 

Lohtia, R., Donthu, N. and Hershberger, E.K. (2003) ‘The impact of content and design elements on banner advertising click-through rates’, Journal of Advertising Research, 43(4), pp. 410–418. doi: 10.2501/jar-43-4-410-418. (abstract only)

Rudolph, S. (2016) Ad blocking on the rise: Statistics and trends [Infographic]. Available at: http://www.business2community.com/infographics/ad-blocking-rise-statistics-trends-01435073#qhiCiyiX3c14Lmx1.97 (Accessed: 24 February 2017).

Sherman, L. and Deighton, J. (2001) ‘Banner advertising: Measuring effectiveness and optimizing placement’, Journal of Interactive Marketing, 15(2), pp. 60–64. doi: 10.1002/dir.1011.

Effective email marketing: The good, the bad and the scary

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Emails have an essential role in any business (of any size); it is currently, the most basic form of online communication between a business and a (potential) customer. Emails can be utilised in a variety of ways; one such is email marketing which involves marketing a commercial message directly to a group of people via email.

For the purpose of this blog, I shall be analysing the merits and detriments of an email from MorphCostumes (figure 2). There are many guidelines available online to help businesses realise the greater potential of email. In most guidelines, it is recommended that emails should be on an automated trigger. The email I have chosen has been sent as a result of an event trigger — the arrival of Halloween.

Subject line

Subject line (figure 1)

The first question to ask is: what made me open the email? The immediate thing that anyone will notice about an email is the subject line. In this particular email, it instantly grabs the readers attention: ‘Guaranteed Halloween Delivery available all weekend for £4.95’ (figure 1). Already, the (potential) customer is drawn to an offer being made, it is short and to the point. The drawback of the nature of the email, however, is its reliance on a very specific target audience – people who, three days before the event, have yet to buy a Halloween costume. If you have already bought your costume, which someone interested enough probably would already, then this email would be irrelevant. Notwithstanding, this particular email may have been personalised, and sent, with disorganised people like myself in mind — they may even have taken into account that the last costume I had purchased from their website was very close to Halloween.

morph-suits

morph-suits-2Email (figure 2)

As I have opted in — unsolicited emails are commonly known as spam (Ellis-Chadwick & Doherty (2012)) — to being sent emails from the company, MorphCostumes begin the email with a greeting featuring my name. This personal touch indicates that they have targeted me in particular (and maybe even care about me getting my Halloween costume). It maintains a familiar tone throughout, wishing me a happy Halloween; mentioning that they don’t want to scare me with deadlines, just their costumes. This keeps things lighthearted despite the urgency of the subject matter, and consequentially, helps build and maintain a closer relationship with customers.

The overall design of the email does not stray too far from that of the actual website by keeping the same colour scheme, although other features have been stripped away, such as the fonts used. The email design is simplistic, repeats images, and altogether has a bland look and feel. Considering that this style is in keeping with the website, this is more of a criticism of the design of the website as a whole rather than just the email. Regardless, this approach may be used to give a stronger focus to the costumes themselves as they are the main subject of the email and website in order to increase the click rate through to the website. They repeat the delivery offer for each set of costumes to emphasise that the offer is site wide. However, a main criticism is the lack of information in relation to the price of each costume advertised. This may be intentional as it baits you into clicking on the picture to find out the price, which the website (landing page – figure 3) promptly tells you, thus increasing the click-through rate.

Landing page

Landing page (figure 3)

The call to action is for the targeted person to buy a costume before it’s too late i.e  2pm Sunday when the deal for delivery in time for Halloween would close. With Halloween being on the Monday, this is obviously the absolute latest the deal can run. The short and snappy sentences, along with the brevity of text, evoke a sense of urgency when reading – further augmented by the phrase ‘don’t miss out!’ at the close of the text. This is a strong call to action, which can help obtain higher conversion rates. The links take you to the landing page where images of costumes that are clicked on directly take you to the page where they can be purchased. A good and correct landing page may be the difference in increasing conversion rate i.e. people actually purchasing the costume they clicked on.

Animation is also used effectively, showing how the eye on a mask moves autonamously – the purpose of this is to generate interest and is not too obstructive or jarring; moreover it’s something that could potentially impress people at Halloween.

Further, in accordance with the guidelines set out by Mohamaddi et al. MorphCostumes give the user an opt-out option at the bottom of the email.

Overall, this email is a (mostly) good example of effective email marketing to a very narrow audience – the effectiveness would reduce if there were an increase in the scope of the audience.

References:

Ellis-Chadwick, F., & Doherty, N. F. (2012). Web advertising: The role of e-mail marketing. Journal of Business Research, 65(6), 843-848.

Mohammadi, M., Malekian, K., Nosrati, M., & Karimi, R. (2013). Email Marketing as a Popular Type of Small Business Advertisement: A Short Review. Australian Journal of Basic and Applied Sciences, 7(4), 786-790.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A study of Sky’s social media campaign around Game of Thrones

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Game of Thrones, a popular television show, has exclusive rights to be shown in New Zealand by SKY TV – The pre-eminent pay TV in New Zealand. Sky has a home in just under half the households in the country (49.4%). Sky, wanting to improve engangement in regions and countries that were lagging behind in viewship, associated themselves with DDB (one of the most influential ad groups in the world) who were given the goal to promote ‘SoHo’ – a paid channel – to current SKY subscribers and to gain new subscribers. DDB were to create a tactical campaign on a relatively small budget to convince people in New Zealand to sign up to Sky or ‘SoHo’.

The challenge for DDB was that the audience Sky wanted to reach had previously dismissed the show as something that wasn’t for them. Taking this into consideration, they knew that the group was likely to ignore regular Game of Thrones adverts on the general TV channels and therfore wanted to drum up interest in this group via recommendations from friends. Thus, the solution was to generate excitment for the upcoming season by targeting existing fans so to grab the attention of the group who were not fans.

To do this they used Brandwatch analytics to identify the most infleuntial themes within the show and what topics the fans were most passionate about. The result was that King Joffrey was found the be the most intensley hated character based on online discussions. From this, they then drew parallels to real life dictators and proceeded to create a statue of Joffrey with a rope around his neck in a large, popular, public space. They raised the question on social media: “It takes millions bring down a king, but does he deserve it?” People were encouraged to voice their opinion and bring down the king via the #bringdowntheking – which every time it was mentioned, a winch was turned and the rope around his neck pulled tighter and eventually would topple him over.

This generated over 875,000 interactions worldwide, bringing a lot more attention to the series as a result, and increasing subscribers for Sky and ‘SoHo’.

From this case study, it should be noted that social media is a powerful way to generate interest, becoming the new ‘word of mouth’. Not just this, but the use of data analytics (text analytics and web analytics) to gather information on what consumers interests are, what they’re talking about, and they’re feelings on certain topics, can be very useful when deciding how to approach a social media marketing campaign in regards to who to target, what topic to target and in what way you target that those things.

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