The local division of global packaged-good giant Unilever is considering ramping up its use of online social networking sites to promote its products after a successful trial with Cornetto ice cream.
Unilever Australasia's vice-president of marketing, David McNeil, said the company had doubled its digital marketing budget every year for the past three years. Digital would account for 10 per cent of its total marketing expenditure this year.
The campaign it ran for Cornetto over the 2007-08 summer was called "No boring bits". Developed by the Sydney interactive marketing agency Soap Creative, it marked the first time Unilever had run marketing in social networking sites such as MySpace, Flickr and blog forums.
The sites and blogs were used as part of an online seeding strategy ahead of the launch of a more traditional advertising campaign across old media including television.
Soap Creative produced a series of videos featuring a character called Terry, who was shown cutting in half Coca-Cola cans, mobile phones and other objects. The videos encouraged people to make their own videos and upload them to the sites.
Six weeks after the online campaign began, Unilever launched a TV commercial the showed Terry cutting a Cornetto in half.
The videos, which did not mention the Cornetto brand, have been viewed more than 1.4 million times since September. The TV commercial ran on websites such as ninemsn, reading more than 8.9 million browsers.
Nitin Mistry, digital creative director at ad agency The Campaign Palace, said Unilever was one of the many marketers that had increased their use of social media and user-generated content over the past year in the hope of creating "dialogues" with consumers.
"A couple of years ago you might have mentioned social media in passing as part of a marketing plan," he said.
"Now it has to be part of the plan for many clients. But there are inherent risks in using social media. People expect brands in the social media space to have an element of transparency."
As part of a promotion fro Smirnoff vodka, liquor marketers Diageo used blogs and social networking sites to give consumers clues to win tickets to the Smirnoff experience Secret Party, which took place last week.
Time Knight, director of digital business at digital ad agency Tequila, said social media was a cost-effective way of extending the massage of a broader online campaign. But he said some marketers were wary of the risks involved with using sites such as MySpace and Facebook.
Tequila used social media as a part of online marketing campaigns for New Line Cinema to promote the movie Be Kind Rewind (which opened here in March) and the Nine Network. For the latter it created a Facebook profile for the TV series Underbelly.
Mr Knight said some marketers, such as those representing financial services companies, which relied on their customer service, credentials and a high level of trust with consumers to promote their brands, would not be willing to expose their brands to the potential criticism that came with an open dialogue with consumers.
Other risks for marketers included having less control over advertising messages and alienating user with overt branding in what most people considered a personal medium.
"There's a certain amount of courage they [marketers] need to have once they start dabbling in these social networks because it is so open," Mr Mistry said.
"If, for instance, something is seen as too obvious a marketing ploy it has the potential to back-fire and have an adverse affect on the overall campaign."
Tourism Queensland has been testing the use of social networking sites as part of its digital marketing strategy for the past year, including setting up a branded YouTube channel to promote its travel destinations and profiles on Facebook.
Chris Chambers, director of digital marketing at Tourism Queensland, said he was aware of the risks in using social media, particularly the difficulty of anticipating what people would say about a brand and the resource s required to deliver constant online updates.
But social networking sites were a good tool to promote Tourism Queensland's events and holiday packages to a broad audience.
"It can be cost-effective way to drive traffic to our website, but there's also a lot of hard work that has to go into developing content to make it interesting for people," Mr Chambers said.
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