MUMBAI: Television is the best form to create demands and Web to fulfill them, making the combination a multi-billion dollar industry.
These were the words of Cimarron Digital (the digital marketing and interactive division of The Cimarron Group) SVP Jon Simon, who was speaking at PromaxBDA on ‘Digital -- The Next Big Thing‘.
While creating a digital campaign, Simon said, one needs to keep the following things in perspective: narrowcast -- targeting a specific group and narrowing down the approach as much as possible; integrate -- integrating all the digital mediums,such as Facebook, Twitter, tablets and gaming.
As digital marketers one needs to continue innovating and the tactics shouldn‘t be just about interactivity with the consumer but also hyper-interactivity.
Talking about the success of the movie, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Simon demonstrated how an effective digital marketing can directly impact movie‘s box office performance. The movie already had 5.5 million fans on Facebook, 275,000 Twitter followers, 58 million video views on YouTube and a total of 152 million trailer views across mediums.
These numbers in the virtual world resulted in the second biggest opening at the box office for any movie ever.
Speaking with Indiantelevision.com Simon said, "House-wives and teen girls are the greatest fan of Twilight book and movies. Besides them, we went after the book readers and they did the rest of our job."
At the conference, Simon laid down the latest digital trends: apps, interactive TV, 3D, tablets, digital advertising, gaming and transmedia and cross-platform He mentioned, "Transmedia is a new term and not very easy to define. It can be something, which is a brand communication, but not in the form of ad."
Moreover, this year 23 3D movies were released in Hollywood, which is more than double that of last year.
Simon also mentioned the five principals essential for a digital marketer: digital mission, planning, create, innovate and engage. "To start anything new, one need to have a digital mission; planning is very important, because you don‘t want to mix-up your message and the brand value should be kept in mind. Engaging is very important: it is not just important to engage the audience but also to make them come back for more", he elaborated.
On understanding social media, Simon noted, "The strategy is to understand the fans and we can do that by marketing intelligence, social listening and fanthrapology and we should be aware of the digital topography to target the customer. Digital has become eat, pray and tech."
Talking to Indiantelevision.com Simon noted that the campaign they created for the movie Inception attracted 24 million hits for the trailer in just the first 24 hours. Another campaign he spoke about was the one created for the movie, The Dark Knight. In this campaign, mobile phones hidden in a cake were sent to a few people. And they were asked to make a call on a specific number and were asked, "Why so serious?"
Simon concluded, "Take advertising personally, ideate, innovate, be passionate and create the future."
