Customer Spotlight: CoOptions
Welcome back to our Customer Spotlight series. This go-round, we had the pleasure of sitting down with Brian Sockin, President and CEO of CoOptions Shopper Marketing. We were thrilled to have Brian join us. Here’s what he had to say!
BL: Hi there, Brian! Could you start out by telling us a little bit about yourself, Co-Options, and the types of clients you work with?
B: CoOptions was founded in 1994 in Connecticut as a partnership-based marketing firm, filling gaps in the industry for agencies that focused on cross-promotion and strategic marketing alliances between complementary CPGs, brands, causes, and consumer retail and service touchpoints. Our senior management came from major CPG companies including Kraft Foods and P&G to bring a higher level of strategic brand marketing and promotional knowledge and approach to this growing area vs. other players that either offered partnership services as an add-on or played a role relegated to matchmaking vs. full campaign development. Prior to founding the agency, I was a brand manager at Kraft Foods, SVP of Alba Kids Agency, and co-founder of Colangelo Synergy, now an Omnicom agency.
BL: As your core business had not been focused on social or influencer marketing, could you share what compelled you to get into the space and build a new revenue line base on an influencer marketing practice?
B: Social influencer marketing was actually the next evolution in our trajectory and fit well into our business vision. While the basic tenets of putting two or more brands together to create “gestalt” marketing programs where the impact of combined assets and efforts is greater than the sum of their individual parts, partnership marketing has changed with technology — today’s marketing is omni-channel, involv[ing] ambassadorship on a mass level through authentic, synced digital and social marketing in addition to traditional media and in-store efforts. Influencers are our new partners in the modern construct, whether this partnership is between brands and influencers as a conduit to consumers and shoppers for individual brands or multiple brand partnerships in our ongoing core business. Social influencer marketing has not replaced our service portfolio, still thriving because it offers clients opportunities to share budgets, reach new audiences, complete usage occasions and consumer narratives, and other benefits. Rather, it has extended our service portfolio to now include people and allowed us to bring real people into the process and execution.
BL: Given your extensive client base within the Shopper Marketing space, how is influencer marketing playing a role in an otherwise traditional, non-digital space?
B: When we first began social influencer programs for clients in the traditional manner through phone and email, it was an arduous task, but valuable to create consumer and shopper groundswell in a grass roots manner online. This has changed with our partnership with Activate by Bloglovin’, with which we can now manage multiple campaigns and track metrics in real time. Social has become a part of nearly all new campaigns, either as a driving anchor or an overlay, depending on the client and campaign.
BL: While researching technology partners to help you launch your influencer practice, what were the key aspects you were looking for in a partner?
B: Technology was sought that allowed us instant access and control over campaign elements and execution, making process more turn-key than previous traditional influencer work.
BL: Could you share one of your most successful influencer marketing campaigns with us? What made it a success?
B: We just completed a campaign for BIMBO brands for Entenmann’s® Little Bites® and Nature’s Harvest® Bread, which produced incredible results. One thing that we like to do is get very engaged with influencers in our campaigns on the Community portal and create a little friendly competition. As with other campaigns, we offer dollar prizes ($250 Walmart gift cards for Walmart-related clients) to the top two recipes or photos or best overall blogs. This tactic nets high level engagement and excellence in post content. It also adds a nice element of fun with the campaign and again, creates that “friendly” competition.
BL: As you have now established your practice, what have been your fundamental learnings?
B: I could probably write several pages in response to this question, but for the sake of brevity, will say that collaboration with the client is at the heart of a successful campaign. When on-boarding a new client for a new campaign, we begin with a brand interview with the stakeholders at the client to understand brand equity, points-of-difference, conversation starters and affinities, and strategy, all under NDA. This allows us to craft a very detailed “Working Campaign” document that includes brand marketing objectives (and social objectives), content concepts and approach that will excite influencers and break through clutter in social networks, creative guidelines for graphics, tactic mixes, and so much more. This gets integrated into a Basecamp with timelines, documents, brand guardrails and legal requirements, graphics and other that we set up for each campaign, into which client and agency teams are invited. Without this type of collaboration, we could not see campaigns succeeding as they do. We also conduct consumer / shopper research for insights and produce a detailed report at the end of each campaign with recommendations that can be shared with buyers at retail by sales teams. All of these things elevate social marketing to a high level of accountability and value-added learning essential for successful campaigns.
BL: Going forward, do you see your approach to influencer marketing change given new client demand?
B: We believe that we’ve honed the model to run like a smoothly oiled Harley and would not change a thing, but we are always open to improvements when challenges or opportunities may present themselves down the road and are ready to adapt to market changes and new client needs.
BL: What do you see as the future of influencer marketing?
B: Specialties or neo-tribes in specific areas of influence. For example, our Health & Wellness division is partnered with Yoga Journal and executes brand trial sampling programs at 3,000+ yoga studios nationally. I believe that influencers will become more highly specialized or segmented in the years to come. We already see some of this happening, but social influencer segmentation is just beginning to take shape. Advents like this will be what marketers seek down the road for more focused and targeted reach with audience affinities that follow specific passions, activities, lifestyles and behaviors.
Many thanks to Samone Wheeler for her contributions to this article.
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