( Via eMarketer)
Q&A with:
Kevin Crociata
Marketing Director, North America Haircare
Procter & Gamble’s Pantene
Rotha Penn
Communications Manager, US Haircare
Procter & Gamble’s Pantene
Pantene’s #WantThatHair Twitter program for the Oscars in February 2013 took the kind of unplanned twist that only an agile marketing team can be ready for, according to Kevin Crociata, marketing director of haircare, North America, and Rotha Penn, communications manager, US haircare, for the Procter & Gamble brand. Crociata and Rotha spoke to eMarketer’s Danielle Drolet about the real-time marketing effort for Pantene undertaken during the awards show.
eMarketer: How did you develop #WantThatHair?
Kevin Crociata: One of the key things we keep in mind when deciding if we’re going to enter a conversation is relevance … If you watched the red-carpet show, it’s the hair and the dress that everybody talks about. We wanted to find a way to be a part of that. With #WantThatHair we had an idea and angle for playing with it. If there’s a look on the red carpet and you want that hair, we have a way to get you that hair with our Pantene products.
eMarketer: Can you walk me through how it was executed the night of the Oscars?
Crociata: We had what we called a war room for the event, as well as for the weekend leading up to it. Then in real time as the event was unfolding, we posted and tweeted in reaction to what was going on in the show to take advantage of the multiscreen environment in which women were watching and following the broadcast.
Rotha Penn: We did something similar for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, too. For a lot of our brands, when there are these big, real moments in time, we enable a war room with an agile marketing team to sit and monitor the situation and the conversations that are going on and then respond to consumers with relevant content.
eMarketer: What surprised you?
Penn: You can prepare all you want, but sometimes the conversation moves in a different path and you have to be ready for that. That’s why it’s very helpful that you work as an integrated brand-building team. If you saw the Oscars, you probably saw that a lot of men had long hair, so the conversation went to men, which we couldn’t have predicted. But because we were all together in a room, we were able to leverage that conversation and enter into that conversation in a relevant way with our products.
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