Who in Cardiff did Snoop reach out to and what was the digital strategy behind it?
When Snoop came to Cardiff smart digital marketers could see he brought more than his hip hop game to town.
This campaign is nominated for a Mashable Award. As somebody involved in digital marketing on a day to day basis, I found it a great case study. I am going to call it Snoops Cardiff campaign but obviously Mr Dogg and his agency Cashmere rolled this strategy out all over the UK.
What’s interesting for me is that the campaign challenges some traditional approaches to marketing.
- The only way to achieve mass exposure is by using TV
- That mass promotion requires ’shock and awe’ levels of bulk media buying. (This is not the same as saying viral campaigns are cheap, quite often they are not.)
Does marketing come in two flavours?
A personal bug bear of mine is the notion that marketing commonly comes in two flavours. Online and Offline or Traditional and Digital. This is increasingly becoming a pointless distinction.
Snoops approach illustrates that media is not confined to online or offline. It also proves that when content is planned and executed well, channels naturally combine to great effect, you could say virally!. As any Social Media Guru will tell you, people love to share and recommend across social media, but its worth remembering strong content can also move across different channels as well.
The power of diffusion and common denominator content
Cashmere's local targeting worked like a charm
Finding ways to access people with content they usually would have no interest in is hard. You need ‘common denominator content’ or ‘go between’ content like a football team or.. erm.. a vegetable!
We use Cardiff based examples here, but elsewhere Snoop uses other football clubs and celebrities and popular figures such as Pippa Middleton and Ricky Gervais to provide a suitable hook to engage people with.
So, not only was this strategy local in its focus it was also enhanced by the fact that it hit a variety of interest groups, some far removed from the core product of a Hip Hop.
The importance of detail – ‘Looking out for yer Mama’
Tired of hearing the old adage ‘content is king’? It’s undeniably true but it is often a throwaway line.
My background is in Search. Search marketers tend to be preoccupied with relevancy and user intent which is another way of saying ‘the audience’. This preoccupation with the audience and relevance pays off with other digital marketing strategies as well.
Being fixated with the audience helps you to understand them, understand what excites, angers, or titillates them. It also enables you to prepare for their reaction whether that’s a sale, a signup, a like, a comment etc etc.
Snoops team obviously did their homework on their audience they new the triggers would be football clubs and the key bloggers to reach out to. Even down to mentioning obscure local news stories where Snoop praised a young local girl for looking out for her mama whenn she chased a thief away.
What about the vegetables?
Who did Snoop talk to and why?
Snoop didn’t succeed because he talked about rap, his album or even his tour date. He didn’t target his fans either.
- He talked about Cardiff with Wales Online
- He talked about Cardiff City Football Club with Cardiff City fans
- He asked the local blogging community for advice (amplification)
- And finally he reached out to vegetable growers like Ian Neale*
The disconnect between a gangster rapper and a prize vegetable grower was too much for TV news networks like Sky News to resist. Snoop turned ‘small, local and obscure’ into a national media news story.
So what happened when Ian Neale met Snoop? The pay off.
Good to his word and “Keeping it real” as they say in hip hop, this is what happened when Ian Neale ‘hooked up’ with his boy Snoop.
