Written by: Low Xuan

For love seeking singles, Tinder has been known as the dating application that connects people with the swipe of a finger. However, animals apart from human are not known to have accounts on the platform. Social Tees Animal Rescue has grabbed this opportunity to raise awareness about animal adoption issue using Twitter. The organization collaborated with the BBH Creative Agency and created a campaign on Tinder to connect people with dogs.

Social Tees Animal Rescue is a not-for-profit organization in New York City that protects abandoned animals from kill shelters and provides them with a safe haven and veterinary care with strictly no-kill policy. The ultimate goal for the organization is to help these animals find their proper forever homes (Rescue, 2018). As a not-for-profit organization, limited budget is always the crucial problem while organizing a campaign. After understanding the characteristics that Tinder is for seeking love and matching with people nearby, The Barn and Social Tees launched this campaign and successfully created buzz on the issue both online and offline.

The campaign idea is simple, which is to tell people to try on a relationship with a dog. The Barn created ten individual profiles for the dogs that were rescued by Social Tees and ready for adoption. Anyone within a mile of Social Tees’ location would receive these dogs’ profile on Tinder and are able to swipe left or right just like how the matching system works on other “normal” Tinder accounts. Swiping left means not interested in the dog, while swiping right means adopting it. However, this does not necessarily equate to the actual adoption. Once the users choose to “adopt” the dog, invitation for meeting up with the dog will be sent to him or her. The users are offered the chance to volunteer at the local animal shelter, taking the dog for a “no strings attached” walk at the park, go for a “short-term relationship” by fostering the dog for a couple weeks, or even fully committing with an adoption. It is pretty much like the relationship on Tinder, where users usually meet-up and try on a short-term relationship or even getting married after that (Zoe , 2014)

Other than the online profiles, The Barn also released a 45s video explaining why there are dogs’ profile on Tinder. This was especially important as it allowed the media to pass around easily and make the news shareable online.

To evaluate the result, we should look back at the campaign objectives. The aims of the campaign were to raise awareness of the animal abandon issues in order to help the animals to find a proper house. Considering Tinder is a free application and there were $0 spent on media, Puppy Love on Tinder had achieved a great marketing performance. The campaign received more than 1,500 doggie-human matches within the first 24 hours. Moreover, it has received more than 55,000,000 media impressions in 95 countries throughout the campaign, which created a global awareness on the need for animal adoption. (Smith, Powers, Taylor, & Nystrom, 2016). Considering the campaign results and the “relationships” it brought together, who says one can’t find true love on Tinder?

References

b/60. (2014, Aug 5). Tinder Creates ‘Puppy Love’ to Match People with Abandoned Dogs. Retrieved from Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3w1eSBXQl8

Kemp, S. (2018, Jan 30). DIGITAL IN 2018: WORLD’S INTERNET USERS PASS THE 4 BILLION MARK. Retrieved from We Are Social: https://wearesocial.com/uk/blog/2018/01/global-digital-report-2018

Love, P. (2014, Aug 1). Puppy Love. Retrieved from Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAgy1vATA7w

Modern Dog. (2014). Puppy Love on Tinder. Retrieved from Modern Dog: https://moderndogmagazine.com/articles/puppy-love-tinder/65589

Rescue, S. T. (2018, March 5). About us. Retrieved from Social Tees Animal Rescue: https://www.socialteesnyc.org/about-social-tees

Smith, L., Powers, M., Taylor, L., & Nystrom, M. (2016, Nov 17). Puppy Love on Tinder. Retrieved from ISSUU: https://issuu.com/luketaylor10/docs/arthur_page_case_study-_puppy_love_

Zoe , H. (2014, Aug 4). Tinder is Helping Users Find Puppy Love–With Actual Puppies. Retrieved from Inc.: https://www.inc.com/zoe-henry/tinder-partners-with-animal-shelther-to-connect-users-with-puppies.html

Written by: Cheung Wing, Lilian

Observed in the United Kingdom and many other countries, Remembrance Day is a day in which people wear poppy pins to commemorate the fallen members of the military force. 2018 was a particularly important year, as it marked the centenary of the end of WWI. However, from a research in 2017(source?), one third of young people neither choose to wear poppy pins nor support any traditions of the Remembrance Day. In light of this, the Royal British Legion collaborated with Geometry Global UK and Blippar, an AR (Augmented Reality) tech start-up, to launch the “Every pin tells a tale” campaign. The campaign aimed at improving the relevance of the Remembrance Day to young people and call for donations to support the living of injured veterans.

The campaign can be generally separated into two parts – the AR app and the VR experiential videos. To bring back stories in times, 60,083 poppy pins with portal to the battle of Passchendaele were designed to commemorate the fallen soldiers. The war was notorious for its adverse weather, which further increased the death toll. By scanning the poppy pin box using Blippar’s AR app, a muddy trench which visualized the torturous battlefield conditions would appear on screen. 60,083 was the number of deaths of the soldiers, therefore each pin was dedicated to come with a unique story of a fallen soldier. That particular soldier’s personal information, photos, letters and diaries which recorded their feelings in wartimes would appear one by one on the AR app like a magical novel, which can attract audiences’ interest to follow the flow of their stories. The AR technology provided consumers a strong sense of presence of the wars: It magnified the emotional appeal brought by the sad stories of the soldiers who died at a very young age. This helped resonate with the audience who are of similar age as them.

On the other hand, the campaign uploaded VR videos on YouTube to show the realistic war situations. People who had VR headsets could experience the immersive sensations brought by the VR videos. They could see armed soldiers rushing to them from all directions, with continuous sound of explosions near them. If they look up, they would find that it was not only the dark clouds that made the sky gloomy, but also the hovering military helicopters. The VR videos actualized the pain brought by the destructions and evoked people’s sympathy to the fallen soldiers.

AR and VR are cutting-edge technologies that have gained popularity recently. They can intensify the effect of experiential marketing to deepen people’s feelings. But one thing to bear in mind is that, VR requires good hardware to guarantee an immersive experience. However, a good VR headset usually costs several thousand, which is quite costly to ordinary people. In this case, those who can’t afford a VR headset could only watch the 360 degrees videos without the sense of realism. So, the description of the devastating war could only be presented in a much weaker way, which was less likely to impress the audience.

The idea of using VR is brilliant, but the hardware problem should also be taken into consideration, or else the effectiveness of the idea would unfortunately decrease.

Reference
http://sites.wpp.com/wppedcream/2018/design-and-branding/digital_-_experiential/every-pin-tells-a-tale
https://www.stephandjosh.co.uk/rbl
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/poppy-remebrance-sunday-young-people-millenials-refuse-to-wear-glorifies-war-a8035976.html
https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-vr-headset

Written by: YEUNG Tsz Wing, Anna

What is your first impression when you walk past a homeless person? Old, lazy or an alcoholic? Truth be told, there are many misconceptions the public hold against the homeless. This is problematic since it leads to the stigmatization of a population that is already marginalized.

Cyrenians, a Scottish independent organization, has always tried to break the stigma online and offline. Unfortunately, a dull topic and long paragraph can never catch public’s attention. Realizing how low the engagement rate was, Cyrenians decided to introduce a new form of communication – chatbot.

Every campaign planning starts with market researches. After distributing questionnaires and conducting interviews, Cyrenians found a number of stereotypes around youth homelessness. The campaign objective was therefore clear – to raise awareness of youth homelessness among Scots. But what is the most effective way to deliver the message? After all, educational videos from their previous campaign failed to receive more than three comments. Thanks to their partner agency Primate, the team discovered a live-chat service called chatbot.

Chatbots are built to automatically engage with received messages. In the past, this mechanism could only provide a scripted response; Not until the introduction of artificial intelligence that made dynamic responses possible. Meanwhile, according to a survey conducted by Drift, over 60% of respondents might use chatbots to receive instant response. This shows another gimmick of the chatbots, which they can answer questions swiftly so as to satisfy audience’s curiosity before they lose interest.

Choosing chatbot as the major communication channel is just one part of the puzzle. More importantly, the team needed to design a human-like chatbot instead of an overly formulaic system. With the help of scriptwriters, a fictional character named Alex was created. Alex’s story was based on a client’ s real-life experience. Although he was young and employed, he didn’t have a home because of a broken relationship. People shall ask questions that they might not feel comfortable asking in real life. Through several modifications, Alex could response sensibly and realistically, bringing the inquirers insights into challenges around youth homelessness and conflicts at home. To reach a wider audience, not only did Cyrenians make use of Facebook Messenger, it also programmed “Ask Alex” into wit.ai which allowed non-Facebook users to get a taste of this innovative idea.

This digital campaign was a huge success in that Cyrenians’ Facebook fans number has increased by 171%. Their engagement performance has had significant improvement as well – posts released after the campaign have gained 106% more likes, 84% more comments, and 70% more shares. Since public used Facebook accounts to chat with Alex, their shared personal information become powerful lead sources for remarketing.

Moreover, as the campaign was centered on a fabricated homeless youngster, this pitch-able interesting element was widely featured on STV nationally and a wide range of press including technical papers, Third Force News and local press.

Reference:

[1] David, H. (2017, April 26). Digital campaign: Cyrenians launches Facebook bot to educate on homelessness. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/2DjB7cd

[2] Ian, G. (2018, May 22). Find out how a chat bot called Alex is helping raise awareness and inspire future service delivery ideas. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/2WQ1mQp

[3] Matt, G. (2018, July 23). How To Position Your Live Chatbots To Increase Engagement. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/2UO0wBU