Is storytelling being outplayed by martech in the digital age of marketing?

This post is sponsored by Biz-Eyes.

We are living in the dynamic era of digital transformation. All around the globe, martech platforms and solutions are seizing the spotlight as the future of communication.

But amid this ever-changing era, Biz-Eyes, which took home two gold and one bronze for three campaigns at PR Awards 2020, still believes in the everlasting power of storytelling.

Technology is a tool that everyone can use. The winner is the one who can use it to tell a better story.

For the past 15 years, Biz-Eyes has been providing PR and communication solutions for global and local corporations such as Unilever, Coca-Cola, MSD, Herbalife, Vinamilk, and Prudential. And throughout this journey, while it still proudly stays rooted to its core values of storytelling, the agency has also expanded and transformed itself to always stay ahead of the game.

With creativity at its heart, it employs internet platforms and new technology as the vessels to deliver impactful stories – ones that can connect brands with their target audiences, not only through the good-old craftsmanship of art and copy, but also through engaging online-offline experiences designed for diverse touch-points in the consumer journey.

Digital transformation, while posing great challenges, has also paved new ways for storytelling.

Take its OMO Wakanda – The Magic of Real Play campaign (gold in Best PR Campaign: FMCG) for example. Instead of going down the conventional road of high-profile celebrities and big ad spending, it collaborated with a travel blogger and together created an inspiring human story. It was the authenticity that saw the campaign spread like wildfire on social media, with hardly any ad spending.

OMO Wakanda – The Magic of Real Play campaign
(Gold in Best PR Campaign: FMCG)

In another OMO Lupin campaign – Greenery for Vietnam (gold in Best Use of Content) – the story of bringing back the green playgrounds was finely crafted and consistently cascaded across diverse channels and integrated PR channels with mainstream media, social media, out-of-home (OOH) banners, activation and a campaign microsite.

Social influencers and social communities were carefully selected not for their numbers of followers, but for their relevant and authentic content. All these factors played together in tandem, creating an impactful “online-merger-offline” content experience for the brand.

OMO Lupin campaign – Greenery for Vietnam
(Gold in Best Use of Content)

Its Coca-Cola – The More the Merrier campaign (bronze in Best Use of Micro/Niche Influencer) – on the other hand, manifested the power of the seemingly humble micro-influencers and social communities when standing together: what is an ocean, but a multitude of droplets?

Coca-Cola – The More the Merrier campaign
(Bronze in Best Use of Micro/Niche Influencer)

What is technology without local insights?

Communication practitioners at Biz-Eyes believe that to create a good campaign, technology advancement or media understanding alone is not enough: they must be adept to local insights.

For example, in the OMO – Greenery for Vietnam campaign – it was the understanding of the local language that gave birth to the wordplay “Trống cây, trống trải nghiệm” – “Trồng cây, trồng trải nghiệm” (no tree, no experiences – plant tree, plant experiences). Here just a change of strokes turned the whole tag line around, delivering a powerful and memorable message.

Having partnered with Biz-Eyes in these winning projects, Mai Ngoc Nhan, brand manager of OMO Matic-cum-D4G-MasterBrand, Unilever Vietnam, shared: “As a prominent global FMCG brand, OMO values the power of creativity in creating brand stories that are unique to each local market. Such is why we teamed up with Biz-Eyes, knowing their mastery of local insights would play a significant role in building successful large-scale multi-channel marketing campaigns.”

What these winning campaigns had in common was not a single genius stroke of creativity, but rather how they had all the stars aligned – when a great story handcrafted for hand-picked insights met the right people via the right mix of delivery channels.

Despite the changing times, consumer heart-to-heart engagement will always be the ultimate key driver behind brand loyalty. Thus, technology cannot hit the stage as a solo act, but must be accompanied by the art of storytelling. Such synergy is also the forte Biz-Eyes is striving to further develop in the years to come.