MUMBAI: Wouldn’t it be great to have the celebrity you swear by mention you in a Tweet, or send you a personalised video message? Social media platform Twitter understands the influence an actor or a sports star has in our lives, and how by bringing these stars close to their fans, an amazing engagement can be created. Riding on this thought, it had devised a campaign for its long term partner Kingfisher for the IPL season. Conceptualised by Twitter India, the campaign allowed the brand to record the star players from six major IPL teams customised messages with fans’ names in them --a first of its kind marketing initiative in APAC, the social media giant claimed.

To make this possible, Twitter went through its archival data looking out for popular first names. Along with it came each person’s preferences and interests including sports.

“We looked into the data and drew a pattern on it. For example, if there are significant number of ‘Amit’s as Mumbai Indian fans, we would add  ‘Amit’ to the list of people, and Kingfisher would get the Mumbai Indians team to record a personalised message for all the ‘Amits’,” Twitter India Business Head Taranjeet Singh explained the mechanism behind the campaign.

Though Kingfisher’s IPL campaign on Twitter had started along with season 9, it wasn’t until the season gained momentum in its third and last quarters that Name Targeting was initiated. Once started, it was a high frequency campaign that generated close to 500 odd videos dedicated to fans. Given that Vivo IPL 9 was a pre scheduled event, it allowed Twitter and the creative team from Kingfisher to plan a month ahead. Though most videos were shot before the tournament began, some were done while IPL season 9 was running based on the feedback on the campaign.

While team Twitter worked closely with the brand, the campaign required quick response and production of content to keep up with Twitter’s data base in a very short time which was made possible with the collaborative effort of the brand’s creative agency JWT, and digital agency 22Feet.

“We received excellent feedback for this campaign. With the help of the Twitter team, we were able to create something intangible for the IPL fans, and we could feel their appreciation for the campaign in the form of Tweets and messages. Apart from the paid campaign, the videos themselves generated several organic impressions for us riding on the brand power,” shared United Breweries, marketing SVP Samar Singh Sheikhawat.

While the campaign’s scale otherwise required a significant amount of time and monetary investment,  having an existing partnership with Twitter put Kingfisher at an advantage when planning this campaign. Being sponsors for six of the IPL teams also acted in the brand’s favour, as it allowed Kingfisher access to the cricket stars as part of the sponsorship commitment. The initiative was included in the overall budget the brand set aside for IPL 9, which, according to Sheikhawat, could be close to 30 percent of the brand’s marketing budget for this financial year.

This is the second time in a row that Kingfisher has tied up with Twitter India for its IPL campaign. Sheikhawat asserted that this campaign proved to be a great opportunity to leverage the brand’s partnership with Twitter. The fact that the campaign was tailor made for Kingfisher only added to the advantage.

“From day one the response was high for the campaign, with 250 per cent increase in the brand’s Daily Positive Sentiment. Not to mention that the brand interacted with over 85,000 IPL fans over the course of the campaign through the videos,” Taranjeet Singh added.

‘Daily Positive Sentiment’ is a unit or score coined by Twitter that measures the overall sentiments behind tweets targeted at a celebrity, a brand or a handle, or even a hashtag or a campaign.

“Daily Positive Sentiment gives out the general emotion behind most of the tweets on a subject. We use a tool called Crimson hexagon that does the analysis on emotions behind tweets after assimilating certain keywords and other data points,” Taranjeet Singh explained.

In line with Facebook’s reactions the Daily Positive Sentiment score is a powerful tool to gather consumer insight for brands.

When asked if Twitter would be willing to partner with other brands and build a campaign using Name Targeting, Taranjeet Singh responded with, “We don’t work with clients on a transactional basis. We look at their objective and then we come up with solutions on how to shape those business objectives through our platform. If we have a client on board whose communication object requires a campaign and name targeting works to achieve its communication objective, we propose it to the brand. But if its campaign requires other innovations such as conversational videos, tweet camps, and other such initiatives that we have earlier offered our clients, we will suggest those. Or maybe we come up with an entirely new solution.”

In parting, Taranjeet Singh added that the Indian market has become a seat for innovations on the partnership front for Twitter, with many more exciting projects in the pipeline.