This year, more than ever before, social media is at the vanguard of the Christmas ad battle, where people are sharing their thoughts and interacting as a result of exposure to the traditional advertising. It's not just a battle of the big TV ads, it's more a battle of the #hashtags and ongoing opt-in engagement levels.
There are plenty of numbers that advertisers will use to try and demonstrate their social superiority -from Twitter mentions, Facebook launch post interactions, #hashtags, YouTube views, Google+'s to number of 'Likes' to name but a few, so we at Pure thought we'd take a look at how the campaigns that launched earlier this month are being run and indeed what results can show to date.
In our view, John Lewis has (again!) come out well on top. The crux of the argument behind this assertion is that as an advertiser we would rather have consumers consuming (i.e. watching) our ad rather than just talking about it.
Numbers such as Twitter mentions, #hashtag shares, Facebook interactions, etc. are useful data and indeed seem to suggest that there's quite a tight race going on with regards to interaction and engagement in this busy market. However, John Lewis launched their ad on YouTube 24 hours before it went 'live' on TV and it's on that platform that they have buried the others under an avalanche of views:
YouTube views
(as at 20th Nov):
John Lewis - 7.8 million
M&S - 770k
Argos - 630k
Sainsbury's - 355k
Tesco - 320k
What's more, they have predominantly achieved their exposure through organic seeding, unlike M&S who appear to have been forced to try and combat JL's dominance by spending heavily on paid-for search. When looking at the John Lewis social campaign in its entirety, you can see that there is an excellent co-ordination of the composite parts - they all work individually but also support and enhance the others.
For example, the ad launch was coupled with a pre-emptive teaser Twitter #hashtag of #sleepingbear followed by #bearandhare as soon as it went live. On that first weekend, the John Lewis Twitter audience grew by 10% (4,000 new followers).
In contrast, Marks and Spencer have had approx. 4,000 mentions of #magicandsparkle and unforgivably, Tesco launched their ad on Twitter but failed to attach a specific hashtag, thereby surely losing both campaign theme and indeed trackability of popularity.
It's interesting to note that elsewhere, M&S has been quoted as having the most Twitter mentions (c.60million) with Tesco (49 million) and John Lewis lagging behind (45 million).
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M&S have also been shown to have the edge on the competition when it comes to Facebook interactions, with 160,000 interactions to their launch post - Asda (87,000), John Lewis (71,000) and Tesco (9,000) are way behind.
Sharing is caring, but in our opinion active engagement and opt-in viewing is a far more effective result.
