Facebook and McCann have unveiled the results of their two Creative Accelerator campaigns. Michael Bratt spoke to both organisations to find out more about them.
McCann released the results of its two Creative Accelerator campaigns, run in partnership with Facebook. Fraser Lamb, McCann’s CEO and executive chairman for Africa, says the successes of the campaigns can be judged by the results which speak for themselves.
Some of the highlights of the Virgin Mobile campaign include an 11% increase in ad recall, outperforming the average for ad recall across 79% of Nielsen Brand Effect for Facebook studies measured, and an 8% increase in campaign awareness among females. The successes for the Coca-Cola campaign include an 18% rise in ad recall, outperforming the average for ad recall across 95% of Nielsen Brand Effect for Facebook studies measured, and a 20% increase in campaign awareness.
But let’s start the tale at the beginning. It all began with Facebook representatives coming to South Africa. They were looking for an agency partner on each of the world’s continents to oversee the social media giant’s Creative Accelerator campaigns. It was being developed by Facebook’s Creative Shop team and its inention is to “help brands and agencies unlock the power of storytelling in high-growth countries”. McCann was selected as the partner and met with the Facebook representatives multiple times. Lamb describes the main benefit of a Creative Accelerator type of campaign. “It allows the agency itself to select a client and create a campaign. Even though there was a lot of to and froing with Facebook, ultimately McCann drove the campaigns,” he said.
The agency picked Coca-Cola for a project in Kenya and Virgin Mobile for one in South Africa. Coca-Cola was selected as the agency felt, “it could best utilise Facebook’s Creative Accelerator type of campaign to connect with people”. Kenya was chosen because Coca-Cola’s hub for its African operations is centred in Nairobi. The campaign played off of the slogan, “It’s cOKe, we’re cOKe, Kenya’s cOKe” highlighting the fact that despite the challenges that Kenya was facing, the country and its people are OK. Terrorism, the general feeling after the last election and the threat of Ebola in Africa, were highlighted as some of the key concerns that the East African nation was facing.
“Coke is about love and happiness and wanted to bring that message to Kenya whose people are naturally happy and welcoming,” Steve Clayton, creative director at McCann, explained. This was done through images of happy, ordinary Kenyans who were encouraged to share their Kenyan happiness. Facebook shared the positive images far and wide. Twitter was also utilised to spread the messages. The campaign ran for a month and the soft-drink giant is so impressed with the results it is planning to run a similar one in Nigeria next.
The Virgin Mobile campaign in South Africa ran for just one long weekend and was designed to promote the cellular company’s free Virgin to Virgin promotion. It aimed to make this message specific to different regions in the country by changing the message into localised lingo. It was on the back of Virgin Mobile’s The Beauty of Voice campaign that aimed to emphasise the power behind a spoken message. Virgin Mobile was chosen because “the brand lends itself to having some fun and has a personality tremendously suited for the social space”, Lamb explained.
Discussing what can be learnt from the two campaigns Fergus O’Hare, creative strategist for Facebook Creative Shop, said, “The results prove that if you care and build campaigns for people through strong creativity, you will see a better business impact. Based on the results and client demand, Facebook will now officially scale the Creative Accelerator programme.”
Facebook is making marketing personal again because we can combine real identity, massive scale and the best targeting available. To help businesses connect with people in high-growth countries, Facebook is taking a new approach in how we develop ad solutions.
The high mobile reach in Africa provides an opportunity to reach people (sometimes for the very first time. With 100 million people active on Facebook, more than 80% come back to Facebook on mobile in Africa. In South Africa, 90% of our 11 million monthly active people come to Facebook on mobile.
