I attended a new marketing event last night, CaseCamp. Based on the popular BarCamp/DemoCamp format its goal is to bring marketing professionals together. It was first event and it consisted of 4 marking case studies. There are a number of rules for the cases including a max of 5 slides, and 5 words per slide. The cases consisted of:
- Snow-for-Gold The first case was presented by Kate Trgovac on Petro-Canada’s 2006 Winter Olympic micro-site, Snowforthegold.ca. The site allows Canadians to send personalized ‘snow flakes’ to their favourite athlete’s online. Kate’s summary of the good/bad points of the case was great. I thought the 2nd benefits of the program were really strong. While the number of actual snow flakes sent was low they did see an increase in traffic the main Petro-Canada site and a number of users who used to their Petro-Canada points to send premium snow flakes. I would have liked to get more information on the online advertising campaign in particular the decision on which sites to advertise.
- Getting-Started The next case was presented by Nicole Mondville on a problem only a bank would have. Basically every year banks need to transition teenagers from free or lower-cost bank programs into high fee accounts. Their ability to engage teenagers in this process to get them to start paying has been minimal ( big surprise ). The case focused on a micro-site that RBC had created to teenagers to choose their banking options. Overall the micro-site was impressive ( as seen after the presentation ) but the presentation was fairly dull. I would have liked to hear more about why the bank doesn’t engage third-parties that are aggressively trying to engage the youth marketing. For example sign-up for an adult-bank account and get $1500 off GM Car. It would seem to me that the banks could have lot more success engaging youth if they packaged their adult offering with incentives from third-parties.
- Blogging at the AGO
Eli Singer and Susan Bloch-Nevitte presented a very interesting case of the AGO using the Blogphere to promote an event. The AGO is in to process of a massive redesign with the help of Frank Gehry. As part of the launch of project they held a special event for bloggers and then included them as part of the media day. The effect was that bloggers produced better articles than mainstream media, which was focused on the Wayne Gretzky scandal. The AGO also conducted a survey of their visitors and saw an increase in their target audience 19-30. I thought the most interesting part was that a high percentage indicated they heard about the AGO through the blogsphere. Blogs combined with ‘word of mouth’ accounted for approximate 60% of visitors during the exhibit. - JBOSS Marketing
Eloqua presented the last case on behalf of JBOSS ( recently bought by Oracle ) on their marketing automation software. The line between marketing automation and lead tracking was a little grey with this presentation. Basically as I understood the Eloqua/JBOSS deployment it allowed JBOSS to track leads and then rank them based on cross-media exposure. For example if a company calls JBOSS it receives a rank of 1, if the same company visits the webpage it receives a rank of 2, if someone from the company then joins a web conference it gets increased to 3. In this way JBOSS can assign a priority to the leads that are coming in from the various sources and filter the quality leads from the noise.
Overall I was very impressed with CaseCamp. It had a much different feel from DemoCamp ( my only other camp experience ) but was very incite full to anyone interested in marketing. Eli did a great job organizing and I think CaseCamp will only improve as it evolves, for example the the 5 words per slide limit will be removed, and I expect the next CaseCamp to be a similar success.