The latest news in the world of customer experience and customer loyalty.
Adidas Creates 30,000 Personalized Videos of Boston Marathon Runners
For the last 30 years, Adidas has been the primary sponsor of the Boston Marathon, and to celebrate its anniversary it created 30,000 personalized videos of yesterday’s race—one for each of the runners. Using RFID chips on each runner’s race bib, street mats that picked up the signals and sent them to seven cameras that were strategically placed throughout the 26.2-mile course, it was able to catch each runner as he/she crossed specific landmarks during the race. Those wide shots were edited together with other scenes from the day, such as runners warming up and the winners crossing the finish line, to create the minute-long video, which were made available to the runners shortly after the race. The innovative strategy was done in partnership with digital agency Grow and presented on a special website, heretocreatealegend.adidas.com. Interestingly, with as much effort that brands put toward sponsoring athletes, neither the overall men’s winner, Yuki Kawauchi of Japan, and the surprise second-place woman finisher, Sarah Sellers of the United States, have sponsorships, and both have full-time jobs.
FedEx Building Brand Equity by Moving King Tut and $1 Billion of His Treasure Trove
Talk about risk versus reward, FedEx signed on to handle a delivery project that is just a slight bit more complicated than getting your envelope to your client six states away. A few weeks ago, an exhibit of $1 billion worth of King Tut artifacts began a tour of the United States, starting in Los Angeles. So who do you call to transport the King’s treasures from Egypt to California? Not two friends with a truck. FedEx had to trick out a Boeing 777 and a fleet of ground trucks with temperature, humidity and light monitors, as well as 24/7 security. FedEx’s SVP of integrated marketing and communications told AdWeek that “You have to get it right the first time. And there’s no standard service for 3,000-year-old artifacts.” FedEx will be packing and unpacking the 150 items for the next six years as it makes its U.S. and European tours before heading back to Cairo where it will be permanently housed in the planned Great Egyptian Museum. So what’s the reward? Significant brand exposure, Fitzgerald said.
Want Loyalty Members? You’d Better Be in Good Form
Mark Zuckerberg has to testify before Congress about security concerns with Facebook. It seems a week doesn’t go by without a brand revealing it had a data breach. Security issues, it seems, have become the central focus of technology these days, and it’s having its impact on loyalty programs. A survey by The Manifest found that customers are abandoning the kind of forms that brands ask them to complete for loyalty programs when singing up for loyalty programs for a number of reasons, not the least of which is security concerns. More than 80 percent of those surveyed say they abandoned at least one online form recently, with nearly a third (29 percent) citing security concerns. Other reasons include the forms are too long and because the forms aren’t mobile friendly. And if they don’t complete the form, they’re lost. Only 20 percent will actually try again later.