Over the July 4th weekend, Coca-Cola orchestrated a strong digital push to support its sponsorship of the Coke Zero 400. Coca-Cola hosted page takeovers on Yahoo and NASCAR’s sites, launched a microsite where consumers could customize virtual products, and ran both flash banners and rich media while using pre-roll, mobile, and social platforms. The brand is hoping that this push helped support its ongoing ‘Share a Coke’ summer campaign.
Despite the increased industry focus of the benefits with digital advertising, digital ads typically fail to generate the reach of more traditional broad based mediums such as TV and print. But from an overarching campaign perspective, Coca-Cola made a smart move with its digital investment. Communicus data shows that while digital and social efforts tend to generate limited awareness in isolation, these media often play a critical role in driving synergistic amplification effects, from a persuasion standpoint, across the broad campaign. While digital executions in isolation can show an effect, digital often plays a key role in boosting the impact of more broad-based campaign media such as TV and print. Thus, seeing one or two media in conjunction with digital generates more impact than the sum of the parts – a 1+1=3 effect.
Coca-Cola has clearly allocated substantial financial resources to this digital effort, hoping for strong reach. But what about brands without deep pockets? Can a limited digital, social, or PR budget generate amplification effects for a brand if it doesn’t have the type of budget Coca-Cola does? The answer is: YES!
Even a modest investment ($500k) into digital efforts can begin to generate campaign amplification effects. The same is true from a social media or public relations perspective: The reach doesn’t have to be exceptionally great to jump-start the cross-media synergies and strengthening effects. The challenge is to ensure that the creative is well integrated across media and sub-campaigns. The common threads tying the work together are more critical than the amount of investment in driving amplification effects.
In the case of Coke, the brand ties its sponsorship and support of the Coke Zero 400 with the ‘Share a Coke’ effort via the virtual product customization and options to share content on various social media outlets; thus maximizing the opportunity for cross-media amplification to occur.
Understanding the amplification effects that your supportive media generates can help advertisers more strategically allocate their spend across supportive media. Quantification of cross-media extensions can also help marketers resist the urge to throw all of the advertising dollars into a single medium when budgets are limited. These amplification effects make a multi-media campaign, even with limited dollars, more likely to generate a strong ROI than a TV only or digital only effort.
