A Millennial campaign with broader appeal was Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke,” which combined a number of elements that work for engaging this age group. The heart of the campaign was to print bottles of Coke, Diet Coke, and Coke Zero with labels that bore 250 of the most common first names, as well as a few group titles like Mom and BFF. If someone’s name was not available, they could request it at ShareaCoke.com for five dollars, or they could go to the site and send virtual versions of a personalized Coke bottle to friends. The availability of these specially marked bottles was promoted through in-store marketing, print ads, social media, experiential marketing, and a microsite, among other elements.
In one commercial for the campaign called “Share a Coke This Summer,”45 a young woman wearing a necklace, “Jess,” goes into a store and buys a personalized Coke for herself as well as one for her friend Alisha, whom she meets on a rooftop where they drink their sodas. Appropriately for this generation, Alisha is African American, which taps into the group’s multiculturalism. Jess and Alisha go back and buy four Cokes—two more for themselves and two for friends (Alex and Maria). They go back again with still more friends to get sodas for a picnic at a park. In the final shots, hundreds of people are dancing and drinking Coca-Cola. Then, at nighttime, Jess goes back to the store where the clerk is closing down for the night. She hands the cashier a bottle that says “Chris,” and they walk away holding hands.
Integral to the campaign was the hashtag #ShareaCoke, which consumers were meant to use when they posted pictures of themselves with their personalized bottle of Coke. Close to 600,000 pictures were posted to Instagram alone.46 Millennials were encouraged to share with the promise that their picture might be featured online or on a national billboard. This campaign was so successful that it reversed Coca-Cola’s ten year sales decline, a tough feat in light of concerns about obesity (and most particularly among teens).47
What makes all this messaging so interesting is that it is the exact opposite of how advertising traditionally worked. Ads would tell you that you had ring around the collar, so you needed to use Wisk. Or that you had halitosis, so if you didn’t use Listerine, you would never get the guy or girl. Advertising was all about telling you what was wrong with you so that you would use the product. It was the very definition of problem-solution advertising. Now, it is all about entertaining you and telling you how great you can be so you will promote the product for them.
Moving from mass marketing to one-to-one interactions has changed how marketers communicate not only with Millennials, but with all of us. Unlike the thirty-second commercial that screamed at you to buy, Buy, BUY, these communications are subtle, friendly, and relationship-building. They don’t appear to be a prelude to a monetary transaction. Because they are personal, they are effective: it’s harder to say “no” to someone you have a connection with than to a nameless, faceless corporation.
These relationships are about getting us to share, as many women did with Dove’s “Sketch Artist.”48 In this video, women describe themselves to a professional sketch artist who is behind a curtain and cannot see them. One after another, the women describe their flaws as they see them—their nose is too big, their lips are not full enough, their jaw protrudes, etc. Then, one by one, someone who has just met one of the women describes what they saw to the same sketch artist, and in case after case, they provide a gentler, more accepting description of the person they saw. The sketches are then placed side-by-side and shown to the woman depicted. The realization of how hard they are on themselves is sad and palpable. This video, like others we will look at throughout the book, manipulates our emotions to generate those strong feelings that move us to share content with others. “Sketch Artist” was viewed more than 65 million times. That’s more than the number of people who typically watch a prime time television show, or the advertising in it. And this video is three minutes long—six times the length of a typical TV commercial. That’s powerful marketing. But stop to think about it for just a minute and ask yourself: What does moisturizer have to do with feeling good about one’s self? And if you passed it along, why did you help Unilever (Dove’s parent company) promote their product?
There are any number of reasons why you might have shared the video, which we’ll talk about in the next chapter. For now, be aware that marketers will increasingly provide you with motivation to pass along their messages. Campaigns will be designed to include participation and personalization. Participation means that we produce the content, whether that’s creating an ad or voting for a favorite Starbucks holiday coffee with a hashtag (#VoteforJoy) so that we can get 50 percent off on the beverage. Technologies are allowing for increased personalization. For example, @AmericanExpress, which sponsored an “Unstaged” Pharrell Williams concert, sent tweets personalized and autographed to people who livestreamed the event.49 Participation and personalization—combined with continuity, being continually in touch with consumers—are the tools marketers use to sustain long-term relationships, particularly with the ever-important Millennials whom they know are most likely to share, share, share.
2
Marrying marketing messages to editorial content is not done because of some malicious plot by advertisers to fool us. To their minds, they are providing cost-effective, useful information and entertainment . . . that just happens to be produced by a marketer. And if you like it enough to share it with your friends and family, all the better.
In one fundamental way, this is not all that different from traditional forms of marketing. In the mass media model, the idea was to promote to a lot of people in hopes of finding the “Early Adopters”—who today are called “Influencers”—who would then tell their neighbors and friends about the promotion.1 You might remember the commercial from Fabergé Organics shampoo, where a woman says that she tried the shampoo and loved it. She told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on and so on, with each “so on” leading to the screen being divided into more and more people. That is the idea behind word of mouth (WOM). One person tells a friend, who tells another friend, until the product becomes a topic of conversation and the latest must-have product. Alternatively, companies have used PR tactics to get trusted others to do the selling that advertising could not. For example, the father of PR, Edward Bernays, promoted Beech Nut bacon by coaxing doctors to recommend the benefits of the product to their patients,2 and bartenders have long been an important component to selling alcoholic beverages. Now, with the rise of digital media—and in particular social media—a number of those discussions have moved online. Marketers amass tracking data based on our interactions and can use it to find Influencers, who might be professionals (like Bernays’s doctors), celebrities, or simply fans of a brand. With this ability, messaging tends less toward mass advertising and more toward Bernays’s one-to-one cloaked methodologies.
Talking about products and brands has become part of day-to-day conversation. In the past, we gave someone information about a product or service because we wanted to be helpful, or because we wanted to appear in the know. You might run into your neighbor and say, “Try Fabergé Organics,” or more likely, “Sam the butcher will order special lamb chops for the weekend if you tell him by Tuesday,” or “I just saw that the record store is having a sale starting on Friday. You better get there early.” Today, you might tell a friend, “I just saw the new Avengers movie. You should really go see it,” or, more likely, you post the movie’s trailer on Facebook and tell your friends what you thought. Similarly, you might provide a link to a business article on Twitter or LinkedIn or post wedding dress