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 During BMW of North America's debut of its M2 coupe on Periscope
last month, the sound dipped in and out as the driver talked about
how the car handled. And one of Royal Caribbean International's
first video streams was disrupted by a viewer posting the alphabet
one letter at a time, in an attempt to clog the comment feed. Still,
the company was happy with the 30,000 viewers the campaign
attracted, said Kara Wallace, vice president, North American
marketing at Royal Caribbean.
While glitches like those would be unthinkable in a produced,
controlled advertising environment, big brands such as Royal
Caribbean, BMW and Benefit are going ahead with plans to use
live-streaming video to attract some of the most finicky consumers,
young millennials who ignore many traditional and online ads. "There
is an authenticity to this kind of campaign," Wallace said. "This is
going to be the future of marketing."
Periscope, which Twitter bought earlier this year, allows anyone to
live-stream an event through their mobile phones, while viewers can
participate by sending cartoon hearts across the video feed and
typing comments which scroll across the screen for all to see. Some
viewers love the chance to interact, with results that can surprise
the advertisers. It is still early days for Periscope, which
currently does not charge advertisers, and had 10 million accounts
as of August, compared to more than 300 million at Twitter.
Some brands are not entirely sold on Periscope as a marketing tool.
Snack and beverage company Mondelez International Inc <MDLZ.O> has
experimented with it a bit, but has not decided if it wants to make
it a staple part of its marketing, said Cindy Chen, global head of
e-commerce. "Periscope isn't really set up right now to accommodate
brands," said Dustin Callif, managing director, digital at Tool
North America, which produced the Royal Caribbean streams. "It's an
experiment which is fun for a brand, but it is also risky."
WORKING ON THE FLY
While brands are well-versed in handling outside comments that come
with all social media, live streaming video is extra tricky as
everything is real-time, executives said. Even Twitter was caught
off guard on a Periscope stream of an earnings call when a watcher
asked CEO Jack Dorsey if he was single, sending a flood of cartoon
hearts across the screen. "The biggest sort of potential headache of
Periscope is that it is a live event and you can't script anything,"
said Pete Harmata, digital innovations manager at BMW of North
America. "You have to adjust on the fly, which can be pretty
strenuous."
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BMW pulled a 24-hour teaser of its M2 coupe, showing just the front
of the car, after a few minutes, when impatient viewers demanded to
see the car immediately. BMW had 5,000 viewers of the debut, a drop
in the bucket compared to television, but it was a lot cheaper and
it reached its biggest fans, said Dan Kelleher, co-chief creative
officer at kirshenbaum bond senecal + partners, or kbs, which
created the campaign. Benefit, owned by luxury-goods conglomerate
LVMH, has at least one person ready to block inappropriate comments
during each stream, said Claudia Allwood, director of U.S. digital
marketing, which has seen 2,000 viewers per stream.
Similarly, thousands viewed Royal Caribbean's Periscope streams,
which showed scenes of everything from customers riding a zip line
on the island of St. Kitts to chefs preparing meals on its ships.
The Miami-based cruise operator streamed the clips live on
Periscope, and ran them on 80 digital billboards across New York
City after a slight delay.
To prepare for any potential problems, the cruise operator had ads
ready to run on the billboards if the Periscope stream went down or
something unsavory happened. While it did not need to run the
replacement ads, some issues arose. A video from a natural water
slide in Puerto Rico had so many viewers that after a few minutes
commenting was shut down, said John Kearse, creative director at
Boston-based Mullen Lowe Group, which worked on the campaign. Thanks
to the delay between the live stream and digital billboards, the
company had time to strip out the alphabet comments that delayed its
stream. They prepared for worse. "We had to know what the F-bomb was
in Russian," Kearse said.
(Reporting By Jessica Toonkel; Additional reporting by Anjali
Athavaley in New York and Yasmeen Abutaleb in San Francisco. Editing
by Peter Henderson and John Pickering)
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