Article
It's a very Twitter Christmas in Piccadilly Circus
A Twitter-based promotion for Coca-Cola Great Britain offers lessons for DOOH/social media integration.
December 20, 2010 by Christopher Hall
It's a very Twitter Christmas for Coca-Cola in London.
The iconic Coca-Cola sign in London's Piccadilly Circus is displaying Christmas messages and tweets from around the world in an interactive digital signage campaign this holiday season.
Finding effective ways to integrate social media like Twitter into digital out-of-home advertising is still a hot topic, and London-based independent design agency Sedley Place is using the Piccadilly Circus sign as a testing ground.
Running up to just before Christmas Eve, the promotional campaign displays moderated tweets sent to @cokezone via Twitter.com on the digital display. The idea is for people to send holiday messages — "send a little love on the Piccadilly sign" reads one call to action on the sign — and the results so far appear to be promising, according to account director Alastair Patrick of Sedley Place.
The numbers are good, but there isn't much of a standard or benchmark for these kinds of projects yet, Patrick said. There haven't been many similar projects in the U.K., he said, so there aren't target success rates or response rates yet for this kind of promotion.
(LG Electronics USA is running a similar, but also text message-based, promotion in New York's Times Square.)
Sedley Place used a bit of a soft launch for the campaign, announcing it first only in a blog on the Coca-Cola website Cokezone.co.uk with only a few thousand readers. About a week, e-mail announcements went out to the entire Cokezone registry, or about 12,000 people, "and it just rocked it from there," Patrick said. The campaign started garnering about 150 to 200 tweets a day, and then about 200 a day after an announcement was put in the trade press, he said.
Tweets initially were posted and moderated during business hours, but the program has since gone 24/7, giving it another uptick and keeping the tweet traffic more steady, Patrick said.
"So the learning there is we should have gone 24/7 at the outset," he said.
Sedley Place also has people circulating in Piccadilly Circus, videotaping holiday messages from passersby in the Circus and then posting them on the sign.
Patrick said he'd be inclined to run a similar kind of Twitter/digital out-of-home campaign on the Piccadilly sign again, particularly after incorporating some of the lessons learned from this one.
"What we have found is that you do need to keep — because we're running it for nearly five weeks, you do need to kind of keep the interest and remind people a lot," he said.
But you can't keep announcing it over and over again, and if you're going to do a similar project going forward it would have to be something new, he said. There needs to be a way to incentivize the tweeting, to get people to become repeat tweeters. Getting a personal message on a sign as iconic as the one in Piccadilly Circus is one incentive, but there would need to be others to keep people active.
"It's understanding what the incentives are and what will drive people to, ideally, repeat tweet and not just do it once," he said. "So I think there's just a lot of learning to be drawn from that, so yes, but it will need to be different and better."
And what does this mean, if anything, for digital out-of-home in general? Patrick isn't sure, but said it would also depend on the location of the digital signage. Roadside or typical outdoor DOOH might not get much traction from integrating something like Twitter, but digital signage with higher dwell times, such as mall- or bar-based signage, could benefit from it, he said.
"But first you have to understand the incentive of getting people to tweet in the first place," he said.
In the announcement put out by Sedley Place in November, Zoe Howorth, the market activation director for Coca-Cola Great Britain, said the sign in Piccadilly Circus "provides Coca-Cola with a unique interactive platform. This activation puts our fans at the heart of the activity, allowing them to engage and communicate with people everywhere," she said.
And the campaign already has produced at least one lasting result, according to Sedley Place's Togs Dalton, who worked on the project with Patrick.
"We have actually just had a guy who has asked his girlfriend to marry him on the Piccadilly Sign through Twitter," Dalton said. "And she just said yes."
