http://www.capsubservices.com

Screen Magazine - Index

Screen Magazine - Screen Magazine: Vol. 29, Issue 20 - Index

Last year, SCREEN
did a story on Chicago-based
interactive marketing agency Avenue A | Razorfish
detailing the growth the company had seen over
the course of the year prior (“Razor Sharp,” Nov.
26, 2007). Big changes have taken place over the
course of this year to warrant an update on the
company, most notably in terms of the company’s
thought leadership in the area of social media and
it’s coinage of the term “social influence marketing.”
What’s New On The Avenue:
Big Changes This Year At Avenue A | Razorfish
“Social influence marketing and our increased focus on that is
probably biggest and most significant change that we’ve seen,”
says Dave Friedman, President of the Central Region for Avenue
A | Razorfish. “Myspace, Facebook and other social media sites
have been around for a number of years, but it’s really over the
course of the last year that we’ve started to see mainstream
marketers make effective use of social media sites.
“We’ve really invested quite a bit in a practice around that [and]
so we have dedicated people that worked on that. We’ve built
alliances with some of the big providers, companies like Pluck and
others to help us, to give us access to our clients to the kinds of new
marketing opportunities that occur through social media.”
An example of how Avenue A | Razorfish is using this idea of social
influence marketing is exhibited in its Crystal Light UPumpItUp.com
– a social networking site that fosters wellness among women. The
site launched earlier this year and was also covered by SCREEN
By Amy Wilschke
����������������������Visit www.screenmag.tv for more daily news than ever before!
Magazine (“Crystal Light Pumps It
Up,” Apr. 28, 2008).
“Traditionally, most marketers have focused on
creating messages and spending lots of money
on media to take those messages and push them
out to their customers,” Friedman explains. “Social
influence marketing is – and a lot of our clients are
seeing this – an opportunity to move from this sort
of ‘yelling at your customer’ to be more involved in your customer’s
life and in the things that are important to them. UPumpItUp is a
great example of that. Where Crystal Light could have tried to
develop a campaign, a message, and gone out and spent lots of
effort on media to try to get that campaign out there, instead it
tried to do something that was relevant to its target audience, so
[Crystal Light] created UPumpItUp.
“Crystal Light the product had been traditionally a grocery
product – you buy it in the grocery store – but it had moved to be
more of an on-the-go product; you can buy the little tubes and put
them in your water. [The brand was] looking to reach out to a more
active, on-the-go customer so [it] created UpumpItUp. It’s hosted
by Mandy Moore and, if you go to the site, it’s very lightly branded
Crystal Light. This isn’t about Crystal Light coming and yelling to its
customers about the product, it’s about [Crystal Light] enabling
things that [its] customers want to do.”
Friedman goes on to add that Avenue A | Razorfish has been
extending this concept to other brands, such as Victoria Secret
with a Facebook community the company
created for the brand’s Pink line, and also
for Pluck Corp, a recognized leader in
social media technology that Avenue A |
Razorfish has been working with this year.
As Friedman describes, the Avenue A |
Razorfish/Pluck agreement is focused on
developing and marketing the industry’s
first offering to inject social media features
like customer comments and usergenerated
content into mainstream digital
advertisements.
“Instead of them having to live on a
destination place, ratings and reviews and
so forth can now exist within a banner ad,”
Friedman says. “So someone can see on
a page an ad for a product they might
be interested in, open that ad up without
ever leaving the page they’re on, and look
at ratings and reviews on the product and
start to communicate with people that
are users of it. Instead of people having
to go to their Facebook page or having
to go to a destination site, they’re able to
actually learn more about the product
and engage with the social perspective
on that product, without having to ever
leave whatever they’re in the middle of
doing.”
//www.avenua-razorfish.com
//www.upumpitup.com
//www.pluck.com