Insight
For Intel, its 18 to 34-year old target audience comprises of major technology consumers. However Intel is an enabling ingredient - it’s the unseen bit inside - and so doesn’t significantly influence their purchase decisions. OMD needed to show the potential Intel had to enrich their lifestyle and passions.
The agency knew that Intel’s audience (like most consumers) love sport and music. Not hugely ground-breaking insights, true, but what it also discovered through further digging was the audiences’ passion for testing the limits and exploring what is possible with their technical devices.
This empowering consumer insight gave OMD permission, in tandem with its new communication strategy of “Look Inside” to shift the focus from “showing what Intel make” to “showing what Intel makes possible” – bringing a new richness around the activities the audiences love – music, sport, fashion and the outdoors.
The second media insight was that The Feed is dying a slow death. With Facebook and Twitter at an average engagement rate of 1%, down from 16% last year, anyone who publishes or reads content on Facebook and Twitter has a cluttered and less engaging experience. What does this mean for brands like Intel who have invested heavily, for many years, in this form of publishing and in content creation yet feels let down by The Feed?
Strategy
Working in collaboration with OMD’s sport and entertainment marketing division and partner creative agencies, social analysis identified pioneering influential individuals within the music, sport, fashion and outdoor areas, and negotiated ground-breaking collaborations. The agency invited these Influencers to explore exciting collaborations with Intel’s engineers, providing them with the support and technology to create products that push the creative boundaries.
The first collaboration launched in early 2013 with fashion designer Christian Joy who created her ‘super guitar-licks rock star jacket’ – a wearable tech light-show that responds to the guitarist’s pedal. The programme has since developed to include influencers such as singer-songwriter Imogen Heap who worked with Intel to invent a running app in which the music keeps pace with the runner’s speed, drawing in ambient sound from the runner’s environment; and Olympic & World triathlon champions, the Brownlee brothers who with the help of Ultrabook and Intel engineers, ‘gamified’ their repetitive training routine, enabling them to race against a virtual, hybrid Super Brownlee.
Each influencer has added something unique making the programme bigger and better, culminating with our biggest influencer to date – Ben Saunders who attempted to cover the longest unsupported polar expedition in history – which launched in October 2013 across 13 EMEA markets. Ben worked with Intel engineers to ensure his Ultrabook functioned at minus 50 degrees centigrade to help him communicate with the outside world from the middle of nowhere.
The campaign was extended to Intel.com, with a dedicated hub documenting the progress of each Influencer through video, images and other content. For the media insight, OMD recognised the gap in engagement and sought to find better content partners that could distribute this extraordinary content via a new network of native content partners to reach, engage, and drive consumers to sale.
Execution
The paid media strategy was simple but dogged: The right content. The right place. The right audience. If it could do this with low levels of paid media, earned media would grow exponentially, so OMD focused on three objectives – engaging advocates; converting interest and creating buzz.
As a result, the planning execution was bespoke to each collaboration – each plan tailored to build on the passion points and the existing equity each Influencer already had, carefully crafting media to allow the paid media to drive further organic growth by embedding it within the social environments both they and the target audience inhabit.
For all campaigns Intel used Facebook, but targeted the passion verticals as well as existing fans. For Christian Joy it targeted Fashion and Technology verticals; for Imogen Heap it targeted Music and Technology verticals; for Brownlee Brothers it targeted Sports and Technology and for Ben Saunders targeted Outdoor activities and Technology.
Intel also used additional channels and media owners specific to their vertical. For Christian Joy it worked with eBuzzing to excite and engage fashion bloggers; for Imogen Heap it worked with Spotify to target listeners through banner advertising; for Brownlee Brothers it used Promoted Tweets and utilised OMD’s RTB tool, targeting sports fans to build a cost efficient long tail hosting content; and for Ben Saunders it partnered with Discovery Channel to share campaign content to an engaged tech influencer audience. Finally the agency worked with Buzzfeed to create bespoke posts and editorial series “#Mindblowing facts” – a media first.
Results
The success in using low levels of paid media to catalyse earned media has seen strong results across the 13 markets, delivering a truly geo-wide campaign delivering against all campaign objectives.• In one month Buzzfeed delivered 87k engagements (page views), 18k social engagements achieving a 1.3X Social Lift – for every 10 people who saw the content from paid media, an additional three people saw the content as a result of sharing. That's equivalent to 30% earned media
• Facebook delivered over 400m impressions - 21% of which were earned impressions
• 55% of the 1m YouTube videos were earned views
• The Intel.com Shop page, where laptops are bought from, recorded an increase in purchase engagement rate from 25% to 40% and 74,000 visits were driven to Intel.com from Facebook
• Over 1.7M actions have been generated (shares,likes, retweets and comments)
• Over 120,000 new Facebook fans and Twitter followers were acquired organically, creating a 1:3 ratio of earned media to paid media overall.
The past year has been a chance for Intel’s social fans to inspire and be inspired by what is ‘inside’ Intel’s products, and to add to Intel’s ever-growing image as a company that innovates and makes new things possible.
