ChasNote

From Mediapost:

“In an increasingly personalized media landscape, the surest way for brands to engage consumers is through cause marketing, according to new analysis from IPG Emerging Media Lab’s team of digital experts.”

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P&G’s Digital Hack Night event last week seems to support that point of view: P&G staffers and 40 pals from the outside raised $100k for charity in 4 hours selling vintage Tide t-shirts

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Also check out Deb Schultz’s post The Chair release on the Digital Hack Night. She thinks the evening’s key take-aways had less to do with cause marketing, and more to do with the emerging culture of conversational media. Importantly, the grammar of this new culture isn’t overproduced: “Many of the P&G folks thought the first task was to figure out the messaging of the campaign, where as the external folks just dived right in in plain English.”

Maybe we all already know more about conversational marketing than we thought.

Yesterday evening I blogged about P&G’s Digital Hack Night, an idea-sharing event that stole its format from reality TV: “A contest among groups of digital marketing experts, Apprentice-style, in an effort to tap social media tools to sell Tide t-shirts for charity.” Participants used their Twitter feeds, their Facebook networks, their own blogs and their friends’ blogs (friend-willing, that is) to raise money for Tide’s Loads of Hope disaster relief program.

Fellow participant Peter Kim summarizes the key business take-away best:

“At the end of the evening, P&G’s CMO Marc Pritchard remarked that in the future, all employees should get involved in activating connections similar to what had just been witnessed.

“The significance of that idea is staggeringly huge. This is a company with 138,000 employees starting to realize the value from having all of its constituents connected and activated. They’re also learning about new tools to change the process of engagement. Events like ‘Digital Night’ help recalibrate the company’s mindset.

“P&G is taking steps to make social business a reality.”

There’s also the non-business part: In 4 hours, P&G staffers and 40 of their pals raised $100,000 for charity. Yup, Tide benefited from tons of free publicity last night. Wouldn’t you love it if every brand with a marketing budget used its resources to funnel money to non-profit causes that need the cash? Go, Tide.

To clear up some confusion I’ve seen in posts, comments and Tweets, P&G didn’t pay me or (as far as I know) any of the other participants to attend the event. No free plane tickets or hotel suites, either. Everyone there does business on some level with P&G, and business partners visit one another to talk business and share ideas on a schedule that works for both parties. I’ve done sessions like this with dozens of clients and partners over the years. But this was the first time I’ve attended one that raised $100,000 for charity.

I’m at P&G’s Digital Hack Night, and the format is like a reality TV show: A contest among groups of digital marketing experts, Apprentice-style, in an effort to tap social media tools to sell Tide t-shirts Tribulation movie full Take the Money and Run trailer First Born move for charity.

It’s amazing how competitive this group gets when you put them on teams!

Speaking of which, hook me up and help the cause. You can buy your t-shirt here Stateside hd Defiance movie . Sales through midnight eastern time will count.

From the Digital Domain

column in the NY Times:

“Independent experts on Web advertising have been watching, however, and what they see is a myriad of difficulties in making brand advertising work on social networking sites. Members of social networks want to spend time with friends, not brands.

“When major brands place banner advertisements on the side of a member’s home page, they pay inexpensive prices, but the ads receive little attention.”

The article cites P&G’s most successful campaign in Facebook, for Crest Whitestips, which used free concert and movie tickets to entice 14,000 members to become “fans” of the brand, 4000 of whom later relinquished their fan status. The article also cites a Tide 2X Ultra campaign that invites visitors to submit “favorite places to enjoy stain-making moments,” which, you’d figure, would spark plenty of activity. But so far there are 18 submissions, two of which come from P&G employees.

Randall Stross, the article’s author, concludes:

“Brand advertisers on Facebook can try one of two new approaches. They can be more intrusive, but the outcome will not be positive. Or they can create genuinely entertaining commercials, but spend ungodly sums to do so.”

There’s a third path: genuinely entertaining and relevant campaigns that don’t cost ungodly sums. Check out what J&J’s Acuvue, BMW, and Intel have done, to name a few. I wish they were paying FM and Graffiti ungodly sums!