Category: Best use or integration of digital media
Advertiser: IBM
Product/Service: IBM
Agency: OGILVY NEW YORK
Chief Creative Officer, North America: Steve Simpson (Ogilvy)
WW Executive Creative Director/IBM: Susan Westre (Ogilvy)
Creative Directors: Seth Rementer/Greg Gerstner/Eric Wegerbauer (Ogilvy)
Associate Creative Director: Niels West (Ogilvy)
Art Director: Uni Son (Ogilvy)
Executive Digital Producers: Pierre Wendling/Tracy Moore (Ogilvy)
Producer: Lauren Dobkin (Ogilvy)
Associate Producer: Anna Santiago (Ogilvy)
Senior Director/Digital Strategy: Priya Varadachary (Ogilvy)
Digital Strategist: Stas Levitt (Ogilvy)
Technical Lead: Ian Crowley (Ogilvy)
Digital Production Company: (Blender Box)
Media placement: Microsite - usopen.org - August 2011
Media placement: Twitter - twitter.com - August 2011
Campaign Description
Regulations were not a factor in this campaign: it existed online and via Twitter.
Effectiveness
While plenty of fans tweet about tennis, few have anything particularly insightful to say: for example: @cyrusthavirus: “We go play u like tennis, you can't do nadal. South south blood sooooo hot, we'll give a Jonah tan”.
IBM saw this as an opportunity.
First, to underscore its involvement with the US Open Tennis. It’s not just a long time sponsor of the event, it provide the technological infrastructure the tournament needs to function.
Second, to demonstrate the capabilities of its analytic technologies to parse vast flows of social media information in real-time. Helping companies make sense of the unstructured ‘big data’ of our hyper-connected world is a huge priority. Talking about this is one thing, proving it in action quite another.
Third, to provide value to tennis fans – and their followers - by providing useful information about the game they follow.
We thus created CourtConnect, a social media stream to make any conversation about tennis smarter. It works by recognising and aggregating tweets and posts about specific players, matches or just tennis in general and attaching a directly relevant and insightful statistic or predictive fact to each. These tweets then join thousands of other US Open tweets and posts from fans, sports writers, players and celebrities to create a continuous stream of smarter social media and editorial content.
Implementation
18m+ people tune in to US Open on TV; 700,000 fans attend matches in person at Flushing Meadows. These days, of course, most fans have a smartphone; many actively tweet and post about their favourite players and games. This online experience harnessed, augmented and most importantly branded the conversations that were already taking place in social media. Fans were led to it via exposure in the US Open website and via messaging at the event.
Outcome
IBM CourtConnect successfully identified and augmented over 100,000 tweets (to an estimated 2.7MM followers) in the 2-week run of the tournament.
The US Open is an exceptionally important corporate hospitality and sales event for IBM; this technology, alongside the Jeopardy!-winning Watson, was a very important and interesting presentation tool for its sales force and their clients at the event.
Overall it was a highly successful display of IBM’s applied analytics, and social computing expertise.