Faster, faster — brands must act in real time

Gideon Spanier
26 Oct 2010

When Gap axed its celebrated blue logo and unveiled a bland replacement, the US retailer had to perform a dramatic U-turn.

An outpouring of anger from consumers on social networking websites forced the clothing chain to bin the new logo within days. Appropriately, Gap announced its retreat in a posting on Facebook.

Some wondered if the abortive, new logo was just an elaborate marketing ruse to gain publicity but it is unlikely given the degree of hostility it provoked. A study by digital marketing firm Webtrends shows two-thirds of online sentiment about Gap was negative in the days after the logo's unveiling.

The Gap saga underscores a key point about the digital era. Consumers can now voice opinions and make decisions in real time. They expect brands to do the same. When Gap's customers were so angry — “how moronic” and “why change something that works?” were some of the messages on Facebook — then the brand had little choice but to act. And quickly.

While real time is a threat — think BP and the slow response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill — clearly it also an opportunity. Little wonder that everyone from brand managers to advertising buyers, from public relations experts to pollsters, is thinking about how real time changes communications.

“Real time is a very important focus for our business,” says Stewart Easterbrook, UK chief executive of media buyer Starcom MediaVest, part of Publicis Groupe. “We have three tenets that we espouse — simple, meaningful and real time. Particularly in the digital world, if you want to do things in an optimal way, you have to be moving in real time.”

The internet is the most obvious area where real time already matters. The biggest business in online advertising is search — worth £2.4 billion a year in the UK. Bidding for search terms and the use of search terms is constantly changing by time and day. “Search should be an entirely real-time activity,” says Easterbrook. “Ninety per cent of it is people administering what they are doing and reporting it back to clients.”

The great advantage of digital is that an agency can continue refining a campaign after it has launched in real time — improving both the creative and the targeting.

Indeed, Easterbrook says the smartest brands recognise how agile they must be throughout a campaign: “What you really need is a part of the budget held back so that when you see something happening, you can activate it.”

Given the rise and rise of the web and mobile — Publicis announced last week 44% of revenues in America now come from digital — it is clear that real time will become ever more important.

This extends far beyond advertising into every area of marketing. Online research firm YouGov, best known for its political polling, says its corporate clients are increasingly asking for instant analysis — particularly to make sense of Facebook, Twitter and the blogosphere.

YouGov chief executive Stephan Shakespeare says during the general election, he produced results at the end of the TV leaders' debates within seven minutes. “Its value to a Toyota during a massive recall or a BP during a crisis is exactly the same,” he says.

Shakespeare points out that real-time polling still only generates a small fraction of revenues but it is growing fast through a new venture, Brand Index, which collects data 24 hours a day.

YouGov is also encouraging its panellists to let it see what they are saying on social media through a tool called TellYouGov. The idea is that if panellists give permission, their comments on Twitter or other social sites automatically feed through to YouGov staff.

When a big news story happens, Shakespeare says: “You see comments coming in pro-actively within minutes on TellYouGov — not within days or hours. If you needed a fix on a story in an hour, you have got people reacting in real time. Clients want to see what's important and not important in terms of noise on social media, using proper statistical techniques.”

Webtrends is another company that helps clients understand social media.

Christian Howes, Webtrends' European head of solutions engineering, who looked at how opinion turned against Gap, explains: “We aggregate all the mentions of the brand and then use tools to apply positive or negative sentiment to all the words. By aggregating that we can get a heartbeat of the brand at any given moment.”

What used to be just the concern of marketing managers has now reached board level, says Howes, who says such sentiment analysis is as relevant to BP or contestants on X-Factor.

Perhaps the most exciting opportunity for marketers is fusing real time and location-based technology, which has just begun with smartphones.

Greg Le Tocq is co-founder of Vouchercloud, an iPhone app which offers discounts at restaurants and shops and has been downloaded 950,000 times. He reckons 90% of Vouchercloud's consumers use the “near me” option, which prioritises offers within a certain radius. What's more, Le Tocq says nearly three-quarters of users only decide to use the app when they are out shopping.

“In real time, they turn on the app when they are out and about and they want a meal or a drink and they browse through the vouchers,” he explains.

There are benefits to the retailer, who can decide to launch an offer within minutes on Vouchercloud — say if it's a restaurant, it's raining that day, and trade is slow. The retailer's head office can also monitor in real time exactly how many vouchers have been used because they are redeemed electronically — unlike paper vouchers.

So the opportunities are limitless. That leaves one question: Can any brand afford not to be thinking in real time?