This year, we were fortunate enough to be selected as a Best Brand Team finalist in the 2012 Manny Awards. While we didn’t win for our Best Brand Team Award submission, we did take home the Best Manny Video Submission Award. In a pretty cool move by MedAd News (the Manny Awards organizer) the honor was awarded via American Idol-style voting live during the awards, where voters would text to vote for their entry―and that’s where the fun really kicked in.

Part Creative Execution

Instead of offering a video chocked full of more information about the agency’s work, the team decided to create a video that not only played to our strengths in metrics and analytics, but also told the truth
about what the audience at the Manny Awards was really thinking.

Watch the video now

Part Social Experiment

When voting opened, the agency team attending the awards show not only cast their votes, they also quickly set a very interesting—if not entirely selfless—social experiment into motion. Leveraging text, Twitter, Facebook, and other social sharing connections they use every day, the group got a grassroots, word-of-mouth campaign going that got results. It unfolded something like this:

8:00 PM      21 votes from Roska Healthcare team
8:01 PM      43 texts sent to Roska Healthcare “friends” asking for votes
                  (+mass text requests to an agency member’s contact file)
8:10 PM      3 Facebook posts
8:15 PM      2 tweets sent
8:20 PM      1 LinkedIn update
10:40 PM     Roska Healthcare awarded Best Manny Video Award

Final Thought

The awards show and experiment above underscore the powerful combination of killer creative and smart targeted marketing, to get results. Put another way, you can have the best creative in the world, but without a robust promotional plan―nobody will know it exists. Killer creatives go hand in hand with killer marketing strategies. If they’re not working together, no amount of tweeting in the world is going to make a difference.
By Kurt Mueller, Chief Digital & Science Officer Roska Healthcare Advertising