No ‘canned’ content in Cannes; Red Touch Media trumps big content marketers

Red Touch Media didn’t want much out of its appearance at MIPCOM, the globe’s largest annual bazaar of TV and movie entertainment content companies.

It wanted everything. The company wanted to educate target audiences on Red Touch’s solutions; create brand awareness and generate leads; build engagement on social media that would organically grow a community; and (most modestly of all) be the most buzz-worthy brand at MIPCOM.

But, as the winning entry explains, “Behemoth booths and six-figure billboards plastered all over the city and convention center made it almost impossible for smaller brands to get noticed.”

To counteract the PR, media, and marketing efforts of big entertainment, Red Touch set up its digital and traditional media to capitalize on the entertainment and publicity weaknesses of typical tradeshow exhibitors.

The details of Red Touch Media’s efforts show that imagination and social media can compete powerfully with bigness and ordinary PR and branding practices. For this, we name Red Touch a co-winner of the Best Use of Social Media for Brand Awareness category in PR Daily’s 2013 Social Media Awards.

Red Touch’s strategy included:

• Instead of a gigantic billboard, a 7-foot-tall dancing squirrel mascot clearly branded with T-shirt and cape
• A convention-floor lounge that looked and worked exactly like a bar (instead of a traditional booth)—a MIPCOM first—that included a “Wheel of Swag”
• Original animations on flat-screen TVs that educated visitors about Red Touch
• A daily Samsung tablet giveaway to collect email addresses and Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ information
• A yacht in a nearby marina to hold meetings, press interviews, networking, and nightly parties
• A professional photographer to take video and pictures at parties, which people could later find and tag on Red Touch’s Facebook page

Red Touch was so glaring a presence on social media that it was named Most Social Brand of MIPCOM 2013. And rightly so with these numbers:

• Red Touch’s total marketing reach grew 131 percent.
• Its marketing reach increased in seven of nine core social media sites.
• Its Flickr traffic leapt 1,293 percent.
• There were more than 100,000 views of Red Touch’s Flickr photos.
• More than 400 entries to its Samsung Galaxy Tablet Giveaway resulted in 2,863 new email subscribers, almost a quarter of whom were MIPCOM attendees (5 percent of total MIPCOM attendees).

Schooling the entertainment business in how real social media pros create buzz, blast through boredom, and tickle jaded palates while they sell their brand were Red Touch Media team members Jon Accarrino, Kristen Rafajko, Kyle Richards, Mike Santiago, Tanya Weisz, Wayne Scholes, Lauren Reynolds, and Chani Thorum. Congratulations, all!

Find out about Ragan and PR Daily’s award programs here.