Real time marketing isn’t marketing at all

It was the 2013 Super Bowl (am I allowed to say that?) and the worst thing possible happened during the third quarter — a power outage. Fortunately for the NFL, the social media folks at Oreo were paying attention and bailed them out when they famously used Twitter to remind viewers they can still ‘dunk in the dark’.

Everyone raved at the quick-witted, real time response. Well, everyone in marketing did, anyway. But did anyone else? Perhaps not.

Forbes contributor Carrie Kerpen captured this point well in a recent article about how real time marketing is mostly just marketers talking to each other. And Tim Peterson from Ad Age sat brands down for the bad news a day after the Big Game with his article, Go home, real-time marketing. You’re drunk.

It made me smile

I remember my initial reaction to the 2013 Oreo tweet — I smiled. And that might have been enough for the Oreo folks; if it made people smile when they thought of the Oreo brand, perhaps that’s as a good return on what was probably a small investment.

Hey, if this was the way the whole real-time-marketing thing was going to work, I was happy. As a writer, it didn’t seem far-fetched that someday I, too, could make people smile.

But then nothing happened.

Oh, it wasn’t as if brands weren’t trying to land the haymaker punch. Many tried to force it and failed miserably — you know who you are, JC Penney, so there’s no need to name names. While the magic combination of wit, timing and a bit of luck required for real time marketing is rare, that wasn’t stopping some brands from trying it anyway.

It wasn’t until the 2014 Grammy’s — when Arby’s called out Pharrell Williams for wearing its hat in a brilliant, perfectly timed response — that we saw anything resembling success from real time marketing again.

Even the 2014 Super Bowl didn’t deliver the holy grail of social marketing smiles this year. In fact, the game was so out-of-hand that most were hoping, maybe even praying, for a blackout or a well-timed and clever tweet. No such luck.

Of course, Esurance did their thing, and did it well…but that was planned months in advance. Even Oreo sat out the game this year, perhaps knowing they couldn’t top last year.

So, is this real time marketing thing just too difficult? Is it worth the effort? And, perhaps most importantly, does it deliver results? If Oreo had earned massive sales from its moment in the sun, we would have heard about it by now, right?

To be sure, followers and tweets increased a great deal for Oreo in the days after the Super Bowl. But what about sales? Does real time marketing translate to the bottom line? Should it?

Company sales increased…modestly

Mondelez, Oreo’s parent company, reported sales increases in the first quarter (following that aforementioned Big Game) that were nothing to write home about. The company grouped Oreos’ growth in with other company-owned brands like Chips Ahoy, Cadbury chocolate, Stride gum and, of all things, Tang.

“Each posted strong increases,” the company said in a release. Apparently, ‘strong increases’ in the mature market of cookies and candy is 7.5%. Respectable growth, for sure, but certainly not groundbreaking.

So we’re left to assume that the millions of likes and favorites didn’t translate into millions in sales, or at least not millions more. And maybe that’s okay.

As of this writing, it’s probably too soon to know if the Arby’s Grammy tweet will translate into sales. I don’t even know if that was the goal. My point is that we should all be clear about what real time marketing can and cannot do and set expectations (and resources) accordingly.

And we should probably change the name, because this kind of real time marketing isn’t really marketing at all. It’s not planned and doesn’t appear to deliver bottom line results.

So, while this practice may be fine as an additional boost when circumstances are absolutely perfect for a specific brand (see Oreo and Arby’s), it shouldn’t be mistaken for a marketing strategy. And, in the vast majority of cases, it’s simply not worth the risk.

So let’s call this thing what it is — hype. Granted, ‘real time hype’ doesn’t have the same ring to it, but it’s much closer to the truth.