Brands begin to see marketing benefits in livestreaming

Apr 03, 2016

As the winds blew and the snow piled up, Southwest Airlines knew what it had to do: livestream events from its busy network operation control centre.

Broadcasting on Twitter’s Periscope and Facebook’s new Live product, a friendly face in a red polo neck guided viewers — potentially frustrated flyers — around a dark room filled with flashing monitors, showing how the airline was trying to cope with the bad weather.

“We’re trying to keep y’all accommodated, safe and informed,” Brooks Thomas from Southwest’s social media team told the audience watching on their smartphones.

And in doing so, he showed how digital marketing is moving beyond pre-written tweets and scheduled Facebook posts into the scary world of live television — taking advantage of new livestreaming services offered by the big social networks.

For technology companies including Twitter, Facebook and Google’s YouTube, livestreaming has the potential to be another big revenue stream, as online video advertising takes off. Digital video advertising spending grew 46 per cent to $7.7bn in the US last year, according to eMarketer, the research group, which forecasts the market will hit $13.4bn in 2018.

More than 100,000 viewers have watched the Southwest video, which is still online, “enormously” surpassing the company’s expectations, Mr Thomas says.

Periscope, which Twitter bought last year before it had even launched, has been welcoming commercial brands, offering them the ability to advertise livestreams in promoted tweets. US retailer Target, cosmetics company Benefit and carmaker BMW have all livestreamed via the app.

Facebook launched Facebook Live for celebrities last summer but only opened it up to everyone earlier this year. The world’s largest social network is usually cautious about overwhelming its new products with advertisements, before people have started using them naturally, so it has not yet opened it up to marketers.

But advertisers are nevertheless eager to experiment with reaching Facebook’s vast audience: car brand Chevrolet, luxury retailer Kate Spade, and beauty delivery service Birchbox have all tried the medium.

“We’re definitely paying attention to Facebook Live,” Mr Thomas says. “The number of live viewers is substantially larger than Periscope. It is a pretty big juggernaut.”

For brands that have tried their hand at live digital broadcasts, the appeal boils down to a favourite buzzword among advertisers these days: “authenticity”.

Kristi Argyilan, Target’s senior vice-president of marketing, says that “the requirements of marketing have evolved in the last five to seven years, away from paying for slick packaging for messaging to force on the consumer”. Today, customers “want to engage in dialogue with a brand and for a brand to be really authentic in how we’re presenting ourselves,” she suggests.

Target has already used Periscope to stream a Lilly Pulitzer fashion event in New York. But the retailer chose a bigger stage for its most recent livestreaming campaign. During February’s Grammy awards, Target sponsored a live commercial consisting of a performance by pop star Gwen Stefani. To promote the event, the company used Periscope, Facebook Live and Snapchat to show real-time behind-the-scenes footage, and signed up social media influencers to spread the word to their followers.

So far, most companies trying out livestreaming are using the platform to highlight product features and launches, such as Royal Caribbean, or to make an event accessible to people who are not able to attend, such as Target.

BMW combined these two angles in its livestream of its new M2 coupe on Periscope, which was aimed at car fans eager for a glimpse at a new model.

“Enthusiasts are obsessed with finding out as much detail as possible about new cars,” says Ed Brojerdi, chief executive of marketing agency KBS, which worked with BMW on the campaign. “We gave them as much access as we could do to the product. It creates a special moment that releasing static photography or a write-up wouldn’t and it’s participatory.”

But while live TV has risks for broadcasters — not least ending up on a bloopers’ reel — it can be even more risky for advertisers carefully managing a brand’s image. Live on camera, products may not work well social media influencers cannot be scripted, and a quick-stream of comments from viewers can be hard to moderate.

In one make-up tutorial, broadcast by Benefit cosmetics, commenters became obsessed with a wonky picture in the background, messaging about it until it was straightened up.

Another potential disadvantage is measurement. Where as marketers now know granular details about who sees their other online ads and what actions they take thereafter, it may not be clear what they are getting out of their livestreaming forays. Target tracks the number of hearts, or likes, that Periscope viewers send during streams and the rate at which they are sent to see if there are drop-offs.

Ben Winkler, chief investment officer at OMD, says many marketers are still “working out the kinks”. “Periscope is like advanced chemistry,” he argues. “If you’re a brand who hasn’t taken the first two or three classes of chemistry, you shouldn’t skip to chemistry 301. If you haven’t made the transition from advertiser to content creator, you may not be ready for Periscope.”

But GE clearly believes it is: it has rushed to adopt livestreaming as part of its geeky behind-the-scenes takes on everything from the science of barbecue to the mathematics of pi.

Its most high-profile project was “Drone Week” — modelled on the Discovery Channel’s popular Shark Week — requiring a lot of preparation, including choreographing the drones’ flight paths in advance. However, the biggest hurdle was convincing the facilities managers of the sites being used to take the risk of broadcasting live, says Sam Olstein, global innovation director at GE.

“At the end of the day, you’re still live. We just had to make sure everyone was comfortable with taking risks,” he says.

 

Source: FINANCIAL TIMES