Real-time mar­ket­ing gets a bad rep in the press, but one Adver­tis­ing Week pan­elist said audi­ences love it and engage with real-time con­tent when it is done right. Fur­ther, he also said not to lis­ten to detrac­tors who say there will nev­er be anoth­er Super Bowl black­out and he thinks con­sumers will actu­al­ly expect to see brands in their social con­ver­sa­tions in a few years.

In the “Be Bold, Be Engag­ing, or Be Gone: The Impor­tance of Real-Time Mar­ket­ing,” pan­el on Day 1 of Adver­tis­ing Week in New York, Chris Kerns, direc­tor of ana­lyt­ics and research at social mar­ket­ing plat­form Spred­fast, not­ed real-time mar­ket­ing doesn’t get a lot of love in the press – and it can cer­tain­ly go awry if not used effec­tive­ly – but there’s also plen­ty of data to back up its effec­tive­ness in reach­ing con­sumers when brands use it cor­rect­ly.

Example 1: The Beyonce Lift

Kerns used the exam­ple of pop star Beyonce’s 33rd birth­day on Sep­tem­ber 4. Fans world­wide used the hash­tag #Bey­Day to cel­e­brate, cre­at­ing a trend­ing top­ic.

In turn, elec­tron­ics retail­er Best Buy was inspired to tweet, “Is it too late to change our name to ‘Best Bey’ for the day? #bey­day.”

Is it too late to change our name to “Best Bey” for the day? #bey­day — Best Buy (@BestBuy) Sep­tem­ber 4, 2014

Not­ing this isn’t part of a Best Buy cam­paign and using words like “weird,” “sil­ly,” and “strange,” Kerns used this exam­ple to define real-time adver­tis­ing, say­ing, “It’s an estab­lished trend that is the cen­ter of atten­tion and brands jump­ing into the con­ver­sa­tion to get atten­tion for them­selves.”

Well-known exam­ples include Arby’s Phar­rell Williams tweet at the Gram­mys, Ellen’s Sam­sung self­ie dur­ing the Oscars and Oreo’s infa­mous Super Bowl black­out tweet.

And while some say real-time mar­ket­ing suc­cess is seen as a moon­shot and if brands can’t accom­plish that it’s prob­a­bly not worth it because they’ll look ridicu­lous and/or that real-time mar­ket­ing means brands are insert­ing them­selves into pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions where they don’t belong, Kerns observed all of the bad press real-time mar­ket­ing has received doesn’t have any actu­al data to back it up.

“There’s lots of con­ver­sa­tion and no data,” Kerns said. “And I didn’t just cher­ry pick head­lines with no data about whether real-time mar­ket­ing works.”

If a brand’s con­nec­tion to con­sumers equals atten­tion and rel­e­vance, Kerns said brands must be where con­sumers are and get their atten­tion some­how and the mes­sage has to res­onate. And, he not­ed, real-time mar­ket­ing has both of those ele­ments.

To wit: Kerns said because Best Buy’s #Bey­Day tweet had no call to action, it’s safe to assume the brand was try­ing to engage its fol­low­ers and get reach and atten­tion.

The result? This par­tic­u­lar #Bey­Day tweet gen­er­at­ed 865 retweets and 533 favorites.

Look­ing at Best Buy’s last 3,200 tweets, Kerns said he exam­ined what was nor­mal for Best Buy for a typ­i­cal con­sumer-fac­ing tweet and dis­cov­ered the brand usu­al­ly gets 34 retweets and 31 favorites per tweet. In oth­er words, the brand was up 2,402 per­cent in retweets and 1,558 per­cent in favorites.

“It doesn’t seem as sil­ly any­more,” Kerns added.

But he also went a step fur­ther and looked at retweet per­for­mance across ten brands for Beyonce’s birth­day and saw that 9 out of 10 had increased retweets and 8 out of 10 had increased favorites. What’s more, the aver­age retweet bump was 842 per­cent and the aver­age lift in favorites was 361 per­cent.

“The audi­ence absolute­ly loves this and the audi­ence engages with con­tent,” he added.

Accord­ing to Kerns, adver­tis­ing and mar­ket­ing has his­tor­i­cal­ly been all about dis­rupt­ing con­sumer expe­ri­ences and dis­tract­ing them with celebri­ties or elab­o­rate sto­ry­lines. How­ev­er, real-time is the exact oppo­site: “Brands are drift­ing in as part of a con­ver­sa­tion and, when they do that, the audi­ence loves it and it makes sense,” he said.

In fact, Kerns also said in a few years, con­sumers will not only wel­come brands into their social con­ver­sa­tions, they will actu­al­ly expect brands there.

“If you have a trend­ing top­ic and brands aren’t jump­ing in, peo­ple will be dis­ap­point­ed – that’s the expec­ta­tion in a few years,” Kerns said.

He divid­ed the world of real-time mar­ket­ing into a matrix that includ­ed both known and unknown top­ics, as well as big, planned events and trend­ing top­ics.

Planned events include the Oscars in which brands know a lot of infor­ma­tion about the event and can cre­ate con­tent ahead of time and still be con­sid­ered real-time mar­keters.

Oppor­tunis­tic events are unplanned moments, like Snick­ers’ tweet to Luis Suarez after bit­ing anoth­er play­er in a World Cup match. In this case, brands known an event is hap­pen­ing and have a team ready to respond.

Then there’s what Kerns called the “Bieber quad­rant,” in that an event is more or less a known quan­ti­ty because “we know he will do some­thing stu­pid” and so brands have to keep eye out.

And the final quad­rant includ­ed every­day events.

Kerns exam­ined whether real-time mar­ket­ing helped in any of these cas­es.

Example 2: Major Events

He looked at 56 brands dur­ing the Super Bowl, Gram­mys, Gold­en Globes and Oscars, find­ing more than 800 real-time tweets.

Kerns also found pos­i­tive results in 46 out of 56 brands and not­ed the aver­age brand saw a 360 per­cent bump in retweets.

Example 3: Royal Mania

When Prince William and Princess Kate announced they were expect­ing a sec­ond child, Nis­san was one of 14 U.K.-based brands to cap­i­tal­ize upon the event and Kerns said 12 saw per­for­mance bumps with an aver­age 400 per­cent increase.

He also found that suc­cess was not tied to a par­tic­u­lar sec­tor. I.e., many brands can suc­ceed with real-time mar­ket­ing.

Example 4: Following Apple

When Apple made its Apple Watch announce­ment in ear­ly Sep­tem­ber, restau­rant chain Chili’s tweet­ed about its own wear­able device, iGuac, which, Kerns not­ed, also had great results.

In fact, 13 out of 15 brands that jumped in on the Apple announce­ment saw an aver­age 1300 per­cent increase in retweets and a 940 per­cent increase in favorites. Those brands also include a diverse ros­ter, such as HTC, Mas­ter­Card, Denny’s and Zap­pos.

“Did the audi­ence care?” Kerns asks of whether the brands had any tie to Apple or the announce­ment.

His answer? “No.”

Example 5: #BendGate

And when reports sur­faced that the new iPhone 6 had a bend­ing prob­lem, or #BendGate, 14 brands jumped in.

The result? These brands saw almost an aver­age 11,000 per­cent bump in retweets and a 5450 per­cent bump in favorites.

“It’s ridicu­lous­ly good when done the right way,” he added.

But this doesn’t mean brands can just jump in on any old trend­ing top­ic.

Example 6: #ThoseThreeWords

Kerns used the exam­ple of anoth­er recent trend­ing top­ic, the hash­tag #ThoseThree­Words.

Accord­ing to his research, 30 brands jumped in and saw an aver­age 183 per­cent increase in retweets and 117 per­cent increase in favorites. Some brands, like Red­Box and Home­Goods, did quite well with their tweets.

But 17 of those brands, like But­terfin­ger and Swif­fer, did not.

But­terfin­ger, which tweet­ed, “Just bought But­terfin­ger!!!!” had 1 retweet; Swif­fer, which tweet­ed its slo­gan, had 4.

Kerns broke down all 30 brands and found the suc­cess­ful brands in this exam­ple led with the #ThoseThree­Words trend while the unsuc­cess­ful brands tried to hijack it with prod­uct place­ment.

“You still need to do the work and do cre­ative,” Kerns said. “You can’t just hijack a trend.”

What’s your take on real-time mar­ket­ing? Is Kerns on the mon­ey? Or is he over­ly opti­mistic?