SXSW Rewind: Real-time marketing takes practice

Posted by Justin Goldsborough | 0 comments

Mar 24, 13

Over the next few days, I’ll be sharing some session recaps and learnings from my trip to SXSW last week with 20 of my FH colleagues. This post came from a pop-up session on 6th Street designed to highlight Oreo’s recent real0time marketing successes at the Super Bowl and The Grammy’s. For a deep dive into all of our SXSW coverage and our BlackBox activation at SXSW, check out http://blackbox.fleishmanhillard.com.

Sometimes the most interesting sessions at SXSW are the ones not on the schedule. Like yesterday’s Oreo panel on real-time marketing. Most sessions are in meeting rooms. This one was on 6^th street at Pete’s dueling piano bar. A perfect fit, since it featured some dueling between social media celebrity Gary Vaynerchuk and Bonin Bough, one of the original creators of Gatorade Mission Control.

The debate went like this:

• Gary “suggested” in his typically brash tone that companies have to be opportunistic and find ways to engage in the conversation as it happens. It’s not a choice. It’s a must in order to survive.
• Bonin countered that Oreo couldn’t have just jumped into Dunk in the Dark – it’s infamous Super Bowl tweet – without having practiced real-time marketing for months: “Oreo had a 100-day campaign (The Perfect Twist) to practice how to do real-time,” he said.
• Gary was adamant that practicing was a 101 mentality in a world where companies need to be at a 201 level.
• But Bonin countered that most companies aren’t flexible enough to move straight to 201.

And he’s right.

This just in…corporate America embraces change at glacial speeds. And wants assurance that everything is going to be all right when they do. If we don’t take a 101 approach and emphasize practice, we’ll never get to 201, which is where we eventually need to be.