Procter & Gamble Digital Night May 2009

Impressions of a landmark event from Jon Wade, Wunderman UK’s Director of Digital Strategy.

I was lucky enough to recently attend the Procter & Gamble (P&G) Digital Night at their European HQ in Geneva.

With little understanding of what was planned, I headed to Heathrow. At the airport I realised there were a number of notable industry colleagues getting on the same plane. I even saw my old boss, the founder of i-level, Andrew Walmsley who clearly knew as little as me about what was in store.

On arrival, we were quickly whisked off for a briefing at P&G – attended by over 150 of P&G’s top marketing people and 50 external experts. We were split into four teams based around the product line-up of P&G’s Pampers. I was put into Active Fit (neither applies to me!) along with James Neill from Mediacom and Nancy Cruickshank from The Telegraph amongst others. Our team was led by Austin Lally (VP, Baby & Toddler Care).

Our purpose was to demonstrate – in a hands-on way – the power of digital marketing to P&G's senior management. To make this tangible, we were going to be asked to raise as much money for UNICEF who, together with Pampers, run an international programme of tetanus vaccination for vulnerable new-born children.

Each team was in a four hour competition with the others to see who could raise the most cash on the night using only digital marketing techniques. A wallboard showed our donation totals from www.justgiving.co.uk (http://www.inapolis.com/digitalnight/) which only added to the already competitive atmosphere.

Austin gave us a pep talk drawing on his personal experience of visiting children in Africa who benefit from the programme. This really helped our team to focus and we spent about an hour discussing tactics. Now, I’m a planner and I like to plan, but an hour? We then had to produce content, seed it and mobilise our network and this seemed an indulgence we couldn’t afford.

Nancy briefed journalists at The Telegraph to get some blog coverage. I'd already sent out emails to colleagues in Europe and Latin America to get people to follow me on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/jwuk, Facebook and Linked In. So, I started tweeting to keep people up to date and tee them up for the big donation push.

For the rest of the time, we split Active Fit into four teams: social media, content creation, campaign optimisation & e-mail. I opted for social media as it’s of professional and personal interest to me, and began working with Armando Santacesaria, Assistant MD, who was great fun. He too wanted to get cracking and decided to send his own email to his contacts in advance of the official Active Fit communication. So, a crash-course in e-marketing followed:

• don’t put a big image at the top of the e-mail, it’ll get stripped out by most e-mail clients
• don’t capitalize or put exclamation marks in your subject line, it’ll get picked up by spam filters
• simple plain text is best for deliverability, keep your message succinct, provide a link for more information and to the donation page itself

Armando was learning a lot, quickly, as were the other marketers on the table who began following Armando’s lead. Armando saw some of the limitations of sending e-mails to multiple recipients using standard e-mail clients. Facebook limits you to 20, Hotmail kept losing addresses from the bcc line… quite frustrating!

A “badge” was created by the content creation team as our profile picture on our social network profiles. Then we started to get the message out to our networks, by tweeting (using the hashtag #pampersactivefit – BTW the shorter the better) and Facebook status updates. My network did me proud with friends and colleagues donating generously. P&G people also called contacts, e-mailed friends and colleagues and steadily the money began to roll in.

Other teams made a good start, but they didn’t have the contacts that our team did. Suddenly, bigger donations started to arrive: Proximity Paris donated £400, Wunderman UK £450, Salma Hayek (no less) added £500 to the pot (making the most of someone having her contact details). Not only were the donations hotting up – 50 people and laptops in the room it got very warm, but luckily P&G rescued us with some cold beers!

Our email blast was a great team effort and our total on the night reached £2,340, which put us in 2^nd place after the initial four hours. At the wash-up meeting, we P&G announced they were extending the competition to run for a few more days to raise as much as we could for UNICEF.

Thanks to everyone's big-hearted contributions the event raised over £40,000 for this good cause. And it's gratifying that my team, Active Fit, came top by raising over £14,000 of the total. The P&G marketers rated the event 4.4 out of 5, which we're told is unprecedented… very much like the event itself.

It’s definitely a moment I’ll look back on and say "I was there". And who knows how much more powerful digitals tools will become in the future for cause-related campaigns and marketing?