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Since morning that day, a two-member team at Social Samosa, a Mumbai-based digital media company, was tracking hashtags like #NamasteTrump, #TrumpInIndia and #TopicalSpot on social media platforms. As a publisher, it curates the best of branding and marketing initiatives in the online realm in realtime. The team thought brands would want to be part of the buzz around Trump. They were right.
Even before the videos of Trump and first lady Melania spinning the charkha at Sabarmati Ashram started doing the rounds, brands like Amul, Cipla and Vadilal had spun their creative posts. “He’s a Dolly Good Fellow,” read the copy of Vadilal’s branded post, with a visual of its mango ice cream bar aka “dolly” sporting Trump’s signature hairdo.
There were at least 5,000 such posts, mostly on Instagram and Twitter, says Hitesh Rajwani, CEO of Social Samosa. To tackle high volumes, his team uses an app called FastSave for Instagram that helps them download all the posts received on the platform directly in their gallery. “We spent two-three hours sifting through all the entries,” he says.
Then the “Soochin” gaffe happened — and a meme fest ensued. “We doubted if brands would make content out of a pronunciation mistake by a politician,” says Rajwani. But they did. “Next day we spotted the first creative around the trend from Burger King India.” Soon others marched in, including Dunzo, Cofsils and Skore.
“What can Trump forgetting the right name? Screaming the wrong one,” read a cheeky post from condom brand Skore. At this point, Rajwani’s team was tracking the hashtags by the hour.
Some brands also tagged trade portals like Social Samosa and Mad Over Marketing in their captions, hoping to be featured in them. On days like this, “the count of messages, emails and tag notifications our portal receives is likely to run into thousands,” says Siddhant More, founder of Mad Over Marketing.
These thousand-plus branded topical posts are called moment marketing campaign. Campaigns that brands create by hijacking a trending topic and weaving clever content around it. They use a trend as an opportunity to market themselves, hoping to appeal to the people following it.
On an average, a digital agency creates a dozen of these on a daily basis. Each exercise takes two-three hours from spotting a trend to releasing a campaign.
Agencies try to meet the unsaid deadline of trade portals so that their work gets featured in them, and dutifully accuse them of favouritism if it doesn’t make the cut. The work picked up by trade portals or mainstream media is used to wield influence within the industry. Agencies use it to retain clients and pitch for more, while brand managers leverage it to demand promotions.
At a time when skipping advertisements has become like muscle memory for people, moment marketing provides tremendous scope in spreading awareness about the brand and fetching engagement.
Make the Most of the Moment
It is not a new concept. Amul has been doing it since 1966. But it is bringing dividends in the digital age. At Dunzo, moment marketing campaigns often yield four five times better conversion rates than its regular social media posts in the same week, says Sai Ganesh, marketing lead at Dunzo. RB says its flagship condom brand Durex’s competitors are emulating its moment marketing activities.
“It will help normalise conversations around sex, enabling an under-penetrated category of contraceptives to grow,” says Pankaj Duhan, CMO, RB South Asia Health.
However, beyond the hype about moment marketing, there is chaos in this factory-like setup.
Brands and agencies have social listening cells to track real-time trends that could emerge out of a sporting event, a cultural phenomenon, a news development, or anything that takes over the internet. Once a trend is spotted, someone shares it on WhatsApp groups that have key people from clients and agencies. In a couple of hours, an agency shares creative options on the same group and seeks approval.
Speed is of the essence here so most parties avoid email trails. If a client is too late in sending approval, the agency ends up missing the trade portal bus and its chance to be featured among the best of that moment. Today, a client demands that its agency roll out four-five such posts every month. Creative writers and illustrators in an agency end up working two-three days on such campaigns every week.
Digital marketing agency WATConsult churns out 250-odd moment marketing posts for over 50 brands from its clientele of 130 agencies every month. There has been a 300% growth in moment marketing posts between 2018 and 2019, says Sahil Shah, executive vicepresident of media and operations at the agency.
“It’s like a drug. Once it works, they want it all the more,” adds Shah. Every time a moment marketing campaign comes up, one has to stop everything and get to it. “It feels like a distraction. But you can’t not do it because FOMO kicks in,” says Tapoja Roy, head of copy, Digital Refresh Networks.
The rise in the volume of work hasn’t led to a hike in fee at most agencies because of competition and low-entry barrier for companies in the business. In the West, agencies specialising in moment marketing charge top dollar — $4,000-5,000 a month.
In India, popular individual creators can charge up to Rs 20,000 for a moment marketing post, but agencies have not been able to demand a separate fee for it. “It is considered a default offering under social media even though it requires additional resources and investment at an operational level to listen to, track and churn out creatives in a couple of hours,” says Amyn Ghadiali, director of strategy at digital agency Gozoop.
For its part, Gozoop has stopped giving in to clients’ demand for fixing the number of moment marketing posts the agency would roll out every month. At Delhi-based agency Grapes Digital, a new policy says they will work on moment marketing campaigns only for trends arising between 9 am and 6 pm. “Sometimes, clients request us to track a topical trend till late hours. It is when they demand it that it becomes a problem,” says Shradha Agarwal, COO of Grapes Digital, the agency known for Manforce’s topical posts.
Until a year ago, there was maybe one major moment marketing campaign in a month, says More from Mad Over Marketing. Now, on days that are topically dry, agencies try to manufacture a trend. They create several posts in a catchy format for their roster of clients and often urge friends in other agencies to get it trending.
Insta accounts like Fake Ad Co and Ad Parody are popular jaunts for agency folk looking for format ideas. In September 2019, for instance, hundreds of brands adapted 22-year-old Ramyakh Jain’s two-arrow post format from Fake Ad Co. If a format is interesting, others in the industry pick it up, turning the whole exercise into an engineered campaign using hashtags like #TrendingFormat.
Even though advertising is often blamed for not giving credit where it is due, digital marketing tries to hang on to some principles.
Every time Social Samosa and its ilk collate posts under #TrendingFormat, they mention the account that started it all. That’s how Jaison Thomas’s young digital agency Blusteak, based out of Kottayam in Kerala, got its moment under the sun. It had started a format called Real Permissions, inspired by a feature on Android phones that asks what an app is allowed to do and access.
Thomas, 22, applied its visual and textual grammar on five popular consumer brands like Tinder, Durex and WhatsApp to create a #TrendingFormat. “Within a few hours, about 1,000 brands had followed our format,” says Thomas, who has received two client leads courtesy of it.
Among hashtags around moment marketing, #TrendingFormat has the highest number of posts on Instagram — over 17,000 at last count.
Yet, the industry is divided on its merit and utility. Some even dismiss its inclusion under moment marketing. Harshil Karia, founder of digital agency Schbang, calls it a fun exercise: “It is not tough to start a trend. We can do it with the 100 brands in our portfolio. But it is important to restrain yourself.”
Both agencies and brand managers are to be blamed for trending formats, says Shah of WATConsult. Why do people do it then? “It gives the brand a fair amount of interactivity and engagement,” says Shah. This keeps creators in agencies busy 24×7 in content creation rather than in brand-building, says Abhishek Asthana, founder of creative boutique Gingermonkey.
In his previous stint as brand manager at an FMCG company, Asthana saw how moment marketing transformed the digital marketing landscape in India: “In a cluttered space, moment marketing helped product pitches sound more human. And brand managers didn’t have to put money into promoting these posts as they had organic reach.”
Over the past year, though, moment marketing has turned into a different beast. It has traded spontaneity for strategy. And the initial fervour has been taken over by fatigue as every brand is trying to grab a share of LOLs. What started as a clutter-breaking exercise is creating a clutter of its own.
While some brands are trying not to overdo moment marketing, most big ones are staying away from #TrendingFormat. Karia of Schbang is picky even about the topical posts his agency does for Fevicol. But moment marketing goes on. As Gingermonkey’s Oscar-themed post for bike-rental startup Bounce says: “OSCARS take time. Bounce It.”
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