Project: ENTERTAIN, ENGAGE & DEVELOP BRAND: Kārums support for 10th Latvian Youth School Song and Dance Festival Category: SPONSORSHIP

Summary

One of Latvia's largest dairy producers Rīgas Piensaimnieks with its flagship product brand – curd snack Kārums – approached us to provide supporting communication activities for their sponsorship of the 10th Latvian Youth School Song and Dance Festival, which took place from July 6-11, 2010. To involve the target audience in the celebration we decided to strongly focus on brand exposure activities before the festival and both online and offline interactive activities shortly before and during the festival. Activities included product distribution to all participants before the festival, a consumer-made product via social networks, interactive competitions via a Twitter account, unique HD 360-degree photos of all the participants and visitors to the festival at www.karums.lv, and supporting media relations. Social and traditional media experts acknowledged the campaign as being excellent in terms of social media use and target audience reach. Kārums’ Twitter account became the biggest and fastest growing corporate account in Latvia and is considered a benchmark for corporate Twitter accounts to date. The Kārums consumer-made product achieved unprecedented sales.

Situation

One of Latvia's largest dairy producers Rīgas Piensaimnieks engaged in sponsoring the 10th Latvian Youth School Song and Dance Festival, which is an important traditional and national folk event celebrated once every five years. The preparation for the festival takes more than a year and involves around 150,000 participants, from all Latvia, while only 30,000 best singers and dancers perform in both main concerts.

Rīgas Piensaimnieks was a third line sponsor providing a EUR 50,000 dedication, as well as provided all participants during the preparation phase with over 150,000 Kārums curd snacks – the flagship of Rīgas Piensaimnieks’ products.

Apart from the financial and product dedication, Rīgas Piensaimnieks asked for supporting communication activities with a total budget of EUR 17 000. Other

sponsors invested much more in supporting communications, therefore we needed to be quicker and more creative in competition for attention.

Objectives

The objectives of supporting communication activities were to generate prominent exposure for the Kārums brand in Festival related events before the festival (while other sponsors were not in activation phase), to present it as sincere and attractive brand, engage people in brand development via pioneering solutions in social networks.

The Song and Dance Festival was chosen, because it was deemed to be the best event to address Kārums’ target audience – devotees of dairy products, primarily – kids, schoolchildren, and their families.

Strategy

The strategy was to position the curd snack Kārums as the official snack of the festival and the main energy source for participants to dance, sing and perform.

As the festival is a celebration not only for small children, but also for their parents and thousands of visitors, the communication solutions needed to be interactive, innovative, and sincere, yet low-cost. As the budget was limited this was not a traditional sponsorship campaign. The strategy was to start the brand exposure activities early, before other sponsors (Feb-July), and to continue with online-based activities via social networks shortly before and during the Festival (April-July), in order to strengthen Kārums’ position in the digital environment and create a buzz about the engaging activities.

Communication activities were about engaging people to join Kārums in the celebration and generating positive emotions that the audience would love to share with others.

Execution

· February-July 2010 – 150’000 curd snacks were given to all festival participants;

· April-July 2010 – Kārums’ Twitter account maintained over 15 interactive competitions: followers received tasks via Twitter, but competed for prizes in a real life environment. Competitions were organized to boost the amount of followers, interact, and maintain the sincerity the brand. Kārums was the first sponsor to communicate and most followed during the Festival’s week (over 1,300 followers);

· May-July 2010 – application “Create Your own curd snack!” on the Latvian social network draugiem.lv, where every user could create a special product by mixing & matching different Kārums forms, flavours, ingredients, and glazing. The Top 10 special products were voted for. The very best was produced and sold;

· July 6-11, 2010 – unique and historical HD 360-degree gigapixel photos of the main concerts were posted on the www.karums.lv. Participants could identify themselves among thousands of others, thereby catching the interest of whole audience.

Documented Results

SOFT RESULTS

• Brand exposure during the preparation phase allowed Kārums to reach its audience long before the festival and stand out;

• 90,501 Kārums curd snacks were mixed and matched on the social network draugiem.lv. 68,951 votes submitted for the Top 10 special products;

• Kārums’ Twitter account became the fastest growing corporate account in Latvia (375% follower increase) and is considered a benchmark for corporate Twitter accounts by industry experts and traditional media;

• The culmination activity – HD 360-degree gigapixel photos captured around 30,000 participants and over 50,000 visitors enabling everyone of them to find and share their photo shot with others in www.karums.lv;

• Kārums’ online-based communication campaign received considerable coverage in traditional media – over 60 publications in television, press, and Internet portals;

HARD RESULTS

• Rīgas Piensaimnieks sold 10 tonnes or almost 230,000 units of the created Top Kārums product, becoming the Top 3 sold new product in Kārums’ 60 year history;

Name of the link

URL

Kārums Twitter account @Kaarums http://twitter.com/Kaarums

Link to videos made for and during online and offline activities in @Kaarums Twitter account

http://www.twitvid.com/index.php?area=search&q=K%C4%81rums&x=28&y=15

Link to one of HD 360-degree photos (not at the original location they were after the Festival)

http://gigapix.no/ut/karums/mezaparks/