Golden Wonder, which has responded within three hours to the news that the Pope is to resign.
Agile project management is something that many tech teams have adopted in the past few years, to rapidly build and develop new products, and to finesse existing ones. There is a focus on sprints, and on getting things done quickly.
Increasingly, we are seeing the signs that marketing teams are also becoming more agile. Consider the amount of advertising and marketing that is based around a news hook. This is nothing new, but it seems to be on the rise.
Social media might be one reason why agile marketing is on the rise. Brands have spent the last few years figuring out how to react on the likes of Twitter and Facebook. They now know what works, in terms of the type of content they share and produce. Social media has also allowed a lot of brands to establish a new tone of voice: more human, more transparent, and – as we shall see – more humorous.
The ability to react quickly on social channels is important, to nip things in the bud, and to encourage interaction and engagement. Many companies are now doing this well, and some have figured out that rapid response can be applied to marketing more broadly. If done correctly, it will be amplified on social media (note the number of ‘favourites’ and ‘retweets’ in the Super Bowl tweets below). Earned media FTW.
I thought I’d compile a bunch of examples of agile marketing, although, by way of a caveat, some of these things may have been planned a little while in advance. While I can’t be absolutely sure of the processes involved or speed of execution, I do know that these examples are mainly ‘reactionary’, be that a response to a news story, to customer or user feedback, or to another brand. I have a bunch of ideas on how to structure an agile marketing team and the kind of processes to put in place, but I’ll explore all of that in a separate post.
Ok, let’s check them out…
First up, three Super Bowl-related tweets. When the lights failed, some sharp marketers spotted an opportunity…
Tide
Audi
Oreo
Oreo also supported Gay Pride by posting a picture of a rainbow-coloured biscuit on Facebook. I’m not sure if it was planned well in advance or dreamt up the day before, but its backing of equal rights generated 300,000 likes and 90,000+ shares (as well as a lot of backlash from the narrow-minded, as you might expect).