“Constant change” is the way Steve Dapper, founder and CEO of Hawkeye, sums up both the agency and the interactive marketing world it operates in.
“I can't think of any time in marketing that has been more fun than now,” he says.
As an example, to promote ABC's “LIVE! with Regis and Kelly,” long-distance marathon runner Dean Karnazes ran 3,000 miles from the Pacific to the Atlantic. And while the events were the highlight of the program, interactive marketing kept people tuned in nonstop for 72 days. Online videos were filmed and posted daily. Field staff and others blogged and tweeted daily, generating 3.2 million daily views and 1 million Twitter followers. The show's rating got a 20% boost.
“Without social, it would have been a series of separate, local events. Social was all spontaneous,” says Wes Wright, manager of interactive. “We were hard pressed to control or censor it.”
At Hawkeye, a mobile lab helps employees understand how customers use technology.
“Last week at a meeting, we all punched in Foursquare to see what kind of coupons we would get so we could understand how it fits into the brand strategy,” Dapper says.
Next to social and mobile, video is the medium to watch.
“It's one we're really embracing through the web and social channels,” Wright says. “Video will create a huge opportunity to extend messaging, especially when you look at the demographics of who's using it.”
Under another program, BASF Crop Protection North America struggled with inconsistent branding across dozens of disparate websites, mobile WAPs, blogs and Twitter accounts, with a number of agencies providing content with little communication among them. To solve the problem, Hawkeye developed a single cohesive content management strategy and system (CMS) with a universal brand mission and image that allowed individual departments and divisions to upload and manage their own content. Thanks to the creation of the single hub, sales reps now carry iPads as selling tools instead of boxes of sales material.
But the biggest beneficiary, Dapper says, “is the customer who goes online for information.” Using an IP address to identify a person's location, the CMS customizes content to climate and geography, offering up product information that is more appropriate for each farmer, which, in turn, “optimizes the productivity of their field,” Wright says.
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