Real-Time Marketing During Oscars: A Smart Move for Your Business

Nowadays, numerous coveted companies seek to boost their brand engagement on special occasions like Christmas Day, New Year, Valentine’s, and Easter. Increased competition and the need to remain in the race have taught companies to utilize every occasion to its maximum.

Promoting business at special occasions and events is an activity of “Real-time marketing.”

Let’s understand this through an example.

The brand that sparked the craze of real-time marketing in February 2013 was “Oreo.” Its “Dunk in the Dark” tweet went viral and generated over 15000 Retweets. It was just Oreo’s tweet during the thirty-four-minute gap when the power went out in the Superdome during the showdown between the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Ravens.

This shows how powerful real-time marketing is for businesses and highlights why brands are running from pillar to post to implement it in their promotion strategy.

Companies strive to make every occasion worthwhile for their businesses, and as a result, they build strategies around such celebrations to touch the nerves of millions of people. Such constant efforts and continuous development in Digital Marketing have made modern-day marketing dynamic.

Currently, the Oscars event is a burning topic and is fast approaching. As a digital marketing professional, I await how brands will cash this much-awaited event. For the last couple of years, I have observed how companies use this event for brand promotion.

In this blog post, I will cover some interesting brand stories that rocked social media using the brand Oscars.

Samsung Achieved Highest Brand Affinity

Though Samsung was one of the sponsors at the Oscars, it beat TV advertisers regarding positive social media sentiments. According to a data company, 4C Insights, Samsung achieved the highest lift in its brand affinity (24 percent) on Twitter and Facebook during the Award ceremony.

The stats below show how a full-fledged preparation can yield outstanding results for the business. However, creative thinking in this kind of marketing plays a crucial role.

Dove’s #SpeakBeautiful

During last year’s Oscars, Dove, a famous personal care brand owned by Unilever, took Twitter by storm with #SpeakBeautiful. The campaign encouraged women to tweet positively about their beauty and body. The campaign was conducted in association with Twitter and generated 29,250 mentions, of which 91 percent were positive.

They started the trend with the notion that “it only takes one tweet to start a trend.” The company even released a 30-second short video on YouTube and Twitter about this during the Oscars. The video was viewed 173,482 times and inspired women worldwide to change how they felt and spoke about their beauty and body on Twitter.

It’s hard to believe, but Dove’s campaign during the Oscars shifted the focus of the online audience towards this issue and helped them attain high brand engagement.

Lego’s #EverytingIsAwesome on Oscar Night

Lego is a Denmark-based company and a leading manufacturer of toys.

At the night of Academy Awards last year, Canadian pop duo Tegan and Sara, in the company of American comedy trio Lonely Island, performed the song “Everything is Awesome” from “The Lego Movie.” During this performance, Lego decided to hand out replicas of the Oscar statuette to celebrities in the audience, and they seemed too excited to have an imitated copy.

Well, you can say that was a brilliant move and excellent product integration by Lego as it generated a buzz over Twitter, for they created something so aligned with both Lego’s Product and the event. This effort resulted in over 6,000 retweets and was a high-engagement moment for the audience.

NASA’s Way to Show Special Effect

Well, NASA also cashed in the moment and grabbed attention during the Oscars in 2015. NASA surprised everyone with its real-time tweet for the movies “The Theory of Everything” and “Interstellar.” The tweet was about a real earth visual without special effects, posted in a sense of humor for the effects usually shown in Hollywood movies. So, NASA showed the world to catch maximum attention; always try to make your tweets entertaining and relevant.

TODAY’s Oscars Moment

Getting into the limelight during the Oscars is not an easy task. To be a great marketer, you need to be a creative thinker, which is exactly what “TODAY” did. TODAY, a famous American talk show, boosted its brand awareness during the Oscars by offering Hollywood fans and followers something unique they could not find elsewhere. TODAY started posting “then & now” style photos of famous celebrities on Twitter. The idea was pretty simple but proved incredibly useful and showed that one can grab users’ attention without even starting a conversation.

Whataburger’s Way of Product Placement

Only a smart marketer can insert a brand into real-time events to attain maximum engagement. The Whataburger’s idea was simple yet intelligent. The company tweeted an image of French fries in a popcorn machine and wished this was available in movie theaters. Fans of Whataburger agreed, which in turn drove high engagement with a note to movie theaters to make this happen.

Case Study – Brand Effectiveness

Here, I am sharing the 87th Oscars Brand Lift research that shows how companies use the Academy Awards for brand promotion.

Summing Up

Online users influence the digital world we are living in, and undoubtedly, they are stronger than ever. Thus, companies do not want to miss a single shot regarding online promotion.

Contact us today to know more!