A special series of posts where the creative slaves at FluffyLinks.com share their thoughts about what’s happening in the creative industry and beyond. You can check them out at FluffyLinks.com and @Fluffylinks For a marketer, what is worse than an unreceptive target market? A target market that will actively filter your messages out. One such market is the heavy internet user.Traditional online banners are becoming less effective every year. According to this research, it's more likely you will survive a plane crash or win the lottery than click a banner ad. Open rates for email campaigns are on the decline and savvy internet users, the majority of whom are the elusive heavy user, are using tools such as Adblock Plus to avoid all online ads.
The challenge then for marketers is to figure out how they can effectively communicate with their target audience, when their target audience is doing everything possible to avoid them. Turkcell, a mobile communication company based in Turkey, took this challenge head on.Turkcell’s marketing team needed to develop a marketing strategy to promote their new smart phones bundled with mobile internet to, you guessed it, 'heavy internet users'. Turkcell hired advertising agency Rabarba from Istanbul, to develop a real time Twitter based competition. This competition featured a mini site with the smart phone, which was packed in gift boxes and covered with post-its. Contestants had to tweet what was written on the post-its to unwrap the boxes, using the hashtag #turkcell.
The final challenge was to get a celebrity to retweet the message, winning the successful Twitter user a phone.The campaign was live for three hours a day over seven days and generated 56,734 tweets. This is a genius idea and might have even inspired the recent campaign for the Dark Knight “The Fire Raises”.Turkcell got many things right in this campaign. First, they correctly identified that their target audience are very active in social media, especially Twitter. They also realised that in order to reach this particular audience in Twitter, they would need to come up with something more creative than just setting up a new Twitter account and send out tweets with hashtags. Turkcell made it easy for users to take part in the campaign by using Twitter connect. This allowed users to log in to the campaign mini site with one click.
Not only had these heavy Internet users to read actual advertising messages to take part in the competition, they had to voluntarily retweet these messages to their friends. Turkcell not only reached their target audience of heavy internet users, they turned them into unsuspecting advertisers.As a marketer you have two options when faced with a difficult target market to reach:Option one: Throw enough mud and hope some of it will stick.Option two: Get creative.Turkcell is a great example of a company who opted for option two with great success. Option two is what all marketers claim they opt for when asked, however very few in reality go down this route. After all, option two is hard work and there’s only so much one can do in between all those martini lunch appointments with media executives.
