Los Angeles based ONE/x announced that the agency won its “Pitch” Thursday night on AMC, besting the veteran ad team at COR for work on the 1-800-FLOWERS.COM account. As the world’s leading florist and gift shop, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc. (NASDAQ: FLWS) is looking to create awareness around its continued expansion into the growing space of social commerce.
The episode reflected many of the profound changes in the agency business, with ONE/x emphasizing social planning, transmedia storytelling, and programmatic media buying in its effort to win over young shoppers through social media. 1-800-Flowers.com has elected to proceed with the campaign that was actually pitched on TV with the official launch Friday of its #JustBecause website: http://www.justbc.com.
Social Gifting
E-commerce pioneer 1-800-FLOWERS.COM has vigorously moved into social commerce — an area that Gartner Research predicts (when combined with mobile applications) could account for 50% of web spending in 2015.
“1-800-FLOWERS.COM has consistently been on the leading edge of new technology innovations, today we’re embracing social commerce to connect deeper with our customers.” said 1-800-FLOWERS.COM President, Chris McCann. “We challenged the agencies on ‘The Pitch’ to create a campaign that is social by design, that helps our customers engage with our expanding family of brands, and to deliver smiles to their friends much more frequently.”
Overcoming Challenges
To position 1-800-FLOWERS.COM as the go-to gifting destination in social media posed a unique challenge as social commerce is an emerging space, largely untapped by e-commerce retailers.
“Millennials simply do not respond to overt or flashy marketing tactics. Rather than being interrupted by clever commercials, they want to be engaged with an authentic dialogue in which they are a co-creator of that brand communication,” said Jason Wulfsohn, partner and Executive Creative Director of ONE/x.
West Coast Approach
Winning over Gen Y required a strategy of immersing the brand into the cultural conversation and earning attention via compelling content that seemingly sprang organically from that culture. Tactically, this translated into a multiphase campaign. First, by seeding unbranded messages and memes, the campaign would seek to inspire consumers to create similar messages and memes to spread and make trend. Second, the campaign would then introduce spreadable content, sponsored tweets, branded videos, native and social ads, and so on that pick up on the best variations of the campaign’s core narrative and expand that conversation to a larger circle of consumers. Lastly, the campaign would switch to more performance messaging; retargeting previously engaged consumers with offers appropriate for their current position in the purchase funnel.
“Being an LA agency, we’re intimately familiar with the transmedia storytelling techniques used to build audiences, engage fans and effectively market entertainment properties. We take a similar approach to telling a consumer brand’s story, not a single idea simply pushed across multiple channels but as a participatory platform that promotes sharing in ways that are native to each of these channels,” said Thomas Westrum, partner and Head of Digital for ONE/x, adding “As Henry Jenkins says, if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead, and that exactly what our emerging form of storytelling aims to achieve.”
Big Date Storytelling
To create the campaign strategy and inform the overall creative direction, ONE/x conducted a rigorous planning phase that included not only traditional qualitative
