Festival of marketing 2016

Unilever

The success of the past won’t be the success of the future
10 billion mobile connections for 7 billion people in the world
4 billion videos published per day
75% of the workforce will me millenials by 2025
Unicorn startups changing the customer expectation
Disruption is the new normal
Experiment, be bold, stand out
Have a strong, relevant vision and stick to it
We need to go from marketing to consumers, to mattering to people
Partner with the right people for your brand
How subscription selling is changing the market
Mirriad adds branded products to footage background, post production
The biggest challenge is changing the mindset of your brand internally
They have internal mentoring schemes
Create a culture of engaging and learning
It’s not digital marketing, it’s marketing in a digital world
80% of success is showing up
They run businesses independently and then absorb them (eg Ben and Jerry’s)
Virtual reality takes us out of the frame based world we’re in right now
Move ahead before it’s perfect, learn as you go to get a better product – also applies to internal transformation
Technology loves scale – global and local
Social media is made for social purpose, brands have big opportunities to engage here
Find brilliant people then get out of the way

The future of experience

Do you really need an app for that?
The future is more convenient and conversational, experiences matter, they differentiate one brand from another
Companies focused on cx perform 20% better
Competitive advantage is now experience
The journey is an important part of the product
Empathy, serendipity, privacy, adaptability, reciprocity = the rules of engagement
Think more about the person and less about the technology
How do you think about serendipity rather than personalisation – aiding discovery, delight and surprise
People use devices to disconnect too, reading, music, video etc
If you want access to personal information to deliver personal experiences, be clear about why
Bring together content and data to create great experiences

LadBible

It’s been called the journalistic jagerbomb
They wanted to redefine ‘lad’ and become a thriving community for young people
Not necessarily a gender based term
Their audience is half the population between 18 and 30
Content is never top down
Creating a balance between series and humourous
Strong values – authenticity
Social listening highlighted that their audience really cared about male suicide, different to the tradition expectations of a ‘lad’
Have fun, be human, believe in what you’re doing
UGC is their most popular content, they get 1500 submissions a day
Be a community first and a brand second
Relatable stories will be watched, however long they are
Try new things
Treat every platform differently
Spark debate, change the world
Gen Y and Z care about helping others
Don’t be afraid to be serious, just deliver it in the right way
Humour is a global language that travels at lightning speed
Create things that people can see themselves in, would you talk about this in the pub?
Don’t cheat the algorithms, make something real and valuable, it’s not all about the vanity metrics
Use your community, native users who know the platforms best
They’re the second biggest publisher after the BBC
They’ve just started their own creative agency – working with RNLI and Dominos
People are diverse, they care about different things
Everyone has a tendency to copy everyone else, break out of the mould

Atom

*I’ve actually been to a version of this talk before, sorry guys, too late to leave, but still interesting!

Mission to change banking
How to build a bank from scratch
Living and breathing the brand internally
They realised people didn’t want a better relationship with their bank, they wanted a better relationship with their money
Technology can improve everyday life
They want to make people feel good about banking
Don’t stop at the ordinary, see how far you can push it
Build an experience around your product
Customisable notifications, eg ‘you’re about to go overdrawn’
Use data, patterns in spending etc
People want to buy from people, how to deliver that digitally through expression and tone of voice
Integrate humour and fun
Mindset and attitude is ageless
Don’t fixate on competition, there’s space for everyone, follow your own values, make your own innovative path

Women’s aid

Women experiencing domestic abuse don’t always realise it
Raising awareness includes to those affected
Big public attitude, blame issues
It can happen to anyone
A lot of people know it’s happening to their friends, but are worried about doing anything about it
Opportunistic marketing, eg using Julie Walters while Indian Summers was being aired
1 in 4 women are affected in their lifetime
Experiential marketing, eg interactive billboard – bruises disappear as people look at the poster
Most people don’t get out
They do a lot of community outreach work, eg training cafe workers to recognise signs or refer people for help
Make it human, make it matter

Social intelligence

Connect your campaigns with important moments in people’s daily lives
Personas can be risky, internally people view them as ‘done’ and stop learning and revising their insights
Compare data sets to draw interesting conclusions and insights
Extract what people love, and where they then over index in other areas

Influencers

*I had a more cynical view of influencer marketing before this talk, thinking there was more in it for the brand than the influencer. It was quite inspiring listening to how much the panel cared about the things they were involved in, there’s definitely a joint responsibility there to create a great partnership that makes a difference

People love culture and they’re influenced by people they care about
Impressive panel – Alice Eve, Zara Martin, Doina Ciobanu
Be specific about the role you want your influencer to have
Big following, low engagement, smaller following, higher engagement
Influencers will want to know who else you’ve worked with, so always think about living your values
Influencers themselves don’t want to be asked to represent things they don’t believe in
Interesting question about the amount of work they would be willing to put in, they all said they would work to create great content, because they want to be authentic and loyal to their fan base
Create content with the influencer, around your brand, rather than giving someone a product and telling them to sell it in the drier sense
“If it’s something you believe in, it’s a responsibility, not a choice” Alice Eve

Does truth still matter

*Really interesting debate, from people on both sides of the coin, there was no conclusion over whether truth matters, I’ve collected a series of quotes from the panel

“Authenticity is the key to success”
“It’s what drives long term engagement rather than short term sensationalism, eg Jamie’s school dinner revolution”
“Always question truth when consuming journalism”
Made in Chelsea actor “I don’t think people care whether it’s true or not, as long as it looks nice and is engaging”
“Programmatically, if it works, it doesn’t matter”
“I don’t think anyone wants to see reality, we want to see something fantastic, not the ordinary middle man news we see every day”
“I have a red top background, if we wanted a story and needed the detail, we just made it up”
“The job of a journalist is to look for the colour in a story, that doesn’t mean we need to add that colour”
“If you can put gold sprinkles on the truth, it’s always going to be more extraordinary”
“We’re a trustworthy brand and that matters to us”
“Instagram is built on the business of filtering reality, it works, people want it”
“Social has forced us to stretch the limits of emotion in order to engage people, that inevitably leads to a stretching of the truth”

Gandys

230,000 died in the 2004 tsunami in Shri Lanka
His family were caught in it
Him and his brother set up an orphans for orphans childrens home
They have strong, personal brand values (designed in London, inspired by travel, fuelled by giving back)
They won the royal young leaders award
Social, they learnt it doesn’t have to be perfect, just genuine, human and reflective of their values
They attach a lot of human story to their brand, eg a tsunami kids book about their journey
They have the Gandys clothing brand that’s for profit, and then the Gandys foundation where all profits go into the work they do across the world

National Trust

Second largest landowner in the UK
Their competition is actually people like Alton Towers, hard to compete as a charity
They also struggle with people saying “charities save lives, you don’t”
“Three years ago, our infrastructure was knackered, nothing really worked”
Transformation was across the whole business, finance, tills, marketing, digital, etc
Thousands of apps and microsites
They had a 98% bounce rate on a non mobile optimised website
They had 50,000 site pages
No structures, no rules, a mess
Create content rooted in emotional connections between people and places
Create content bespoke to each channel
Big challenge for internal transformation during the process
They had 500 web editors to transform the website
They needed everyone on board to even create the MVP
They thought about intuition on each operating system, eg iOS, Windows, Android
Apps very personalised
They implemented mandatory internal training, extended to regions as well
Includes brand, managing social accounts, etc
Really agile, needed top level buy in to run an itterative schedule of transformation, and to change the culture of believing things were ‘done’
Innovation and risk taking at the heart
Big culture of knowledge sharing, ongoing review
Share learning early – don’t wait until it’s perfect, get buy-in along the way for what you’re working on
They mapped social traffic and realised 9-5 didn’t work, now they hire people specifically to work evenings and weekends “relevant to our audience, fair to our team”
They found digitally keen people around the network, eg a periscope of a National Trust chef making scones
They optimised this along the way based on user feedback
They use the platforms that work for them – 360 cameras really work for live covering renovation of buildings
Stripped out policies and process to allow experimentation here
If you can’t communicate your strategy easily, your audience are never going to get it
Respond quickly to trends, they made their amazing Pokemon Go video overnight – to solve a problem of people breaking into their properties
They don’t ask permission a lot of the time, just do it
Use data to get internal buy-in
They have internal and external developers and ux specialists

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Word of mouth marketing

Über, AirBNB and Dropbox are a great example
You don’t have to worry about building trust, it’s already there because a friend you trust has recommended it
You can control this to a certain extent, eg incentive or member get member
Customers come to you already liking and trusting you, they’re more likely to take more actions and to refer on to someone else
Young people share more, convert less, older people share less, convert more (fashion industry)
Get people at the right time, eg after a holiday
Don’t ask for too much information
Social capital “will my friends like me for sharing this”
They found “give your friend this present” tested better than “get money off for yourself” type incentives
A/B testing
Encourage referral at points of delight, eg post checkout