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Social Marketing Continues to Change the Way Brands Advertise

This entry was posted by Greg Roth on February 26, 2010

Ad Age’s recently released 2010 Digital A-list featured some great branded social marketing campaigns from advertising giants like Starbucks, Mountain Dew, Honda, and Procter and Gamble. As one of the pioneers of social marketing, we feel it’s important to be a standard-bearer for the industry. Any news about the impact of social media is good news for Buddy Media.

Ad Age’s A-list focused much of its coverage on the way social marketing has changed the way the Consumer Packaged Goods vertical advertises. The number of successful Facebook campaigns launched by CPG brands is telling of how major corporations have embraced social media. As a result of the success seen by companies like P&G, more and more brands are realizing the benefits of tapping into the engaged audiences that proliferate social media channels. Some highlights from the Digital A-list include:

  • Starbucks’ ‘Free Pastry Day’ Facebook campaign drove hoards of coupon-toting fans into stores last summer
  • Mountain Dew allowed Facebook fans to select the colors of new flavor extensions via a live UStream event
  • Coca-Cola’s 5 million Facebook fans easily outnumber the roughly 300,000 monthly U.S. visitors to its brand website
  • American Honda Motors Co. did increase the fans of its Facebook page nearly fivefold to more than 300,000 through its “Everybody Knows Someone Who Loves a Honda” campaign, launched in October. But the point really was to point out that everyone knows a Honda lover, and to that end the campaign website has calculated more than 3 million friends of self-proclaimed Honda lovers.

These were all stupendous campaigns with phenomenal results. When viewed in conjunction with some of the work we’ve recently launched (Budweiser’s Superbowl Commercial Poll, NHL’s All-Star Vote), it’s clear that all kinds of businesses have gone from experimenting in social media to relying on social marketing to drive their most important advertising initiatives.

It’s no longer a question of ‘why’ brands should embrace social media, but instead a question of when. The time to get serious about social marketing is now!