A short time ago, a good social media campaign meant letting people know you were on Facebook. Over the past few years, that’s changed dramatically, to the point where social campaigns meet and sometimes even exceed their traditional advertising counterparts in terms of creativity and innovation. Small wonder then that a lot of business executives now view social media as being as important as a corporate website and more traditional forms of online advertising.
All the evidence suggests they’re right to think that way too. Research from eMarketer suggests that brands can profit dramatically from a well-executed social campaign and a 2012 study by research company Millward-Brown showed that there was a direct correlation between how successful a company is and how well it uses social media.
That goes a long way to explaining why it’s become such big business. Twitter alone is expected to rake in US$1-billion from ads next year and a large portion of the US$1.36-billion in revenue Facebook reported in Q1 of 2013 came from ads.
With that kind of spend comes serious incentive for innovation and The Bees Awards, a San Francisco-based award for the best use of social media, now in its fourth iteration aims to recognise the best examples of social media innovation. The awards have just announced the winners in 24 categories, whittled down from some 83 nominees.
For their fourth edition, The Bees Awards received social media marketing campaigns from six continents and 23 countries. While that diversity is perhaps not as widely reflected in the winning entries as it was in the nominations (more than half of the winning campaigns are from the US), campaigns from Russia and Brazil both managed represent emerging market countries with wins.
The Russian winning entry in the “Best Innovation” category, Blind, comes from the Hungry Boys agency and was one of the campaigns that we picked as being particularly strong when the nominations were announced. The campaign aims to change the treatment of blind children by giving people insight into what they go through. The primary way of doing this was with a website that challenged people to navigate a character through a virtual city using only sound.
Brazil’s winning entry meanwhile came in the “Best use of App for Social Media Marketing” category. The app, built for Bradesco F.Banking by AG2 Publicis Modem. The agency built a fully functional Facebook banking app for Bradesco, a top Brazilian bank. Capitalising on the social banking trend, the app came with the promise of the same level of security offered by internet banking. But it also leveraged the social power of Facebook by allowing people to create financial share and collaboration funds covering everything from money for humanitarian causes to money for a friend’s birthday party.
Winners in some of the other categories will perhaps have been more familiar to web users around the world. The winner in the viral video category, for instance, Bubba’s Hover from US agency Thinkmodo — which saw top golfer Bubba Watson riding around in a hovercraft modified to function as a golf cart — has racked up nearly 8-million views on YouTube.
The Dragon Shadow Launch campaign for the third season of hit show Game of Thrones, which took top honours in the Best Art Direction category, received serious attention online. The ad, which was placed in The New York Times, had a dragon shadow covering a double spread in the paper over fake articles that hinted at plotlines from “Game of Thrones.”
The full list of winners, as well as nominees can be found below:
1. Best Use of Micro-Blogging Platform
2. Best Use of Social Media Platform
3. Best Use of Mobile
4. Best Use of Alternative Tools
5. Best Use of Ad Banners on Social Media Platform
6. Best Use of Analytic Tools
7. Best Engagement with Customers
8. Best Relationship with Blogs
9. Best Reputation Management
10. Best Crisis Management
11. Best Social CRM
12. Best Branded Viral Video
13. Best Marketing Within Social Games
14. Best use of Geo-Location for Social Media Marketing
15. Best use of App for Social Media Marketing
16. Best Tool or Technology for Social Media Marketing
17. Best Student Work
18. World Student Brief
19. Best Social Media Marketing Theory
20. Best Innovation
21. Best Copywriting
22. Best Art Direction
23. Best Campaign
24. Agency of the Year
