Pushing the digital envelope

Lessons from the efforts of Delta Airlines, ESPN X Games, Lays and marketing of the state of Florida

What sets digital apart from other media channels like print and television is not just its ability to facilitate a two-way conversation, but its always-on status in the consumers' lives. Naturally, brands across the world are falling over each other to exploit this connection of the consumers with their gadgets and social media. Creating communication campaigns is one way of doing that. A more effective way is to create, what marketers call, immersive experiences. Here we look at five such immersive digital experiences that have been hailed internationally.

CASHING IN ON THE USER GENERATED CONTENT MANIA
For Lay's the task of launching four new flavours of potato chips in China was proving to be tricky. Lays needed to kick-start sales quickly, so the need was to craft communication that built immediate awareness and preference. Lays already had a global marketing campaign, "Do us a Flavor," but this idea could not be translated for the China market.

Brand: Lays

Agency: Razorfish
Digital case: Who's Your Flavorite

Using local slang and social references, Razorfish morphed an irrelevant global idea into a consumer-centric multi-screen innovation. The words were juggled around and a new tagline, "Who's Your Flavorite", was launched.

User generated content enjoys great popularity in China. This insight was used as the binding thought for the campaign: Webisodes (on Youku) introduced a young daughter and her meddling, matchmaking father as he searched for his 'Flavorite', representing each new flavor. Then, responsive scripting allowed consumers to co-create plots and other social content. The campaign was found engaging enough for the co-creation to continue for three months.

A CASE FOR SEAMLESS EXPERIENCE
Constant interactions with the consumers result in a wealth of information that can be used effectively to drive better customer experiences. To this end, Delta Airlines has launched a programme to offer its customers a 'holistic connect' across its digital channels to give them control over every aspect of their journey.

Brand: Delta Airlines
Agency: Razorfish
Digital case: Touch the future of travel

The airline has kiosks branded "Touch the Future of Travel" at travel agent outlets and certain airports in the US. Users can search by mood, selecting word tiles that describe their ideal vacation, which results in an array of destination possibilities. Another area of focus is a reinvention of Delta.com and the shopping experience. Most customers turn to the website first for researching and booking travel. The redesign was aimed to give a more retail-like flow, where customers can select flights, select or upgrade their seats, add hotels/cars for their trip, and check out through a simple step by step process.

Delta is also creating a personalised information centre on its corporate website for customers to manage their travel plans and loyalty programme memberships in one dashboard-style view. This section allows customers to set their travel preferences, view and keep track of their SkyMiles accounts, and save and manage payment preferences. This area acts as a "home base" for the customer's entire relationship with Delta.

Delta also ensures customers can manage all their personal travel data and access their 'home base' from any device. The airline is rolling out these features and functions across all its digital touch-points.

CONVERTING INTANGIBLE EMOTIONS INTO TANGIBLE PROPERTIES

X Games is an annual extreme sports (like skateboarding, snowboarding, biking etc) event held in the US. A small section of the total viewers watch these events live; about 99 per cent experience them on their screens. The challenge was to create an atmosphere, a sense of heady rush, for this huge digital viewership. The answer was found in the "HypeMeter".

The HypeMeter is a real-time interactive engine (live during X Games events). Simply put, the HypeMeter measures multiple input sources like Twitter velocity, Facebook share counts, phone shaking, and tablet gaming real time. The meter then weighs these inputs according to a predetermined formula, and then outputs a score from 1 to 100. This result is then broadcast at determined intervals to all X Games digital properties.

Brand: ESPN X Games
Agency: Sapient Nitro
Digital case: HypeMeter

HypeMeter scores are important in both live and catalogued contexts. When live, a fan can reference the total impact at any given moment, which provides the user a new kind of real-time context. In the catalogued state, the HypeMeter scores are used to populate a cumulative "hype chart," which builds through an X Games event to create an interactive graphic that visualises key moments as peaks in the line chart.

HypeMeter utilises the second screen effectively, ensuring attention isn't diverted from the sport when the content is live and transforms the way fans interact with the sport. ESPN has patented this property, using it for other events too. As Sapient Nitro puts it, the HypeMeter has captured the intangible emotion of excitement and converted it into a tangible media of record.

MAKING TRAVEL EXPERIENCES INTERACTIVE
To make Florida a hot destination for globe trotters, Visit Florida, the official tourism website of the state, has undergone a series of upgrades. Visit Florida's new site embraces many of today's web design trends, such as a Pinterest-style grid-based layout, consumer-centric navigation with an intuitive user-friendly content flow, inspirational travel themes that allow users to customise their search through BuzzFeed-like labeling, and a responsive design that let the site adjust to whatever platform users may choose.

Since the entire communication projects Florida as an "epic family holiday destination", a game-based platform was created to help visitors to the website plan their holidays and tinker with the itineraries.

Brand: Florida
Agency: Sapient Nitro
Digital case: Visit Florida

Similarly, a mobile web map was created to highlight attractions in the region, that can be viewed on the go, putting information at the traveller's fingertips. Visitors were encouraged to share their Florida stories through Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.