Mr. Schafer devised the studio as an alternative to traditional
marketing campaigns, which are inherently slow and thus ill-fitted
for the immediacy of the internet. Rather than going through a long
approval process with its clients, the Moment Studio creates
timely, photo-based Facebook posts designed to take advantage of
the real-time web.
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Each morning, production teams for each brand conduct "editorial
meetings" in which they brainstorm posts that are tied to whatever
is happening in pop culture that day. Pitches are accepted,
drafted, edited, sent for quick client approval and then
produced.
Persuading clients to agree to a quicker operation was initially
a challenge, Mr. Schafer said, but both Purina and Pepsi said the
studio has delivered significantly higher engagement.
Deep Focus was already the digital AOR for Purina's Petcentric
and Beneful brands when the petcare company agreed to the Moment
Studio concept, and since then, Purina's brand-page engagement has
increased a factor of five to six.
"We've experienced unprecedented levels of engagement with
content [the Moment Studio] is producing," Chris Padgett, Purina's
VP-marketing, said.
Mr. Padgett added that 50,000 to 60,000 people engage with a
single piece of Moment Studio produced Facebook content. Prior to
that , 10,000 to 12,000 Facebook users were engaging with a post on
average.
Pepsi reported similar gains, with global head of digital Shiv
Singh saying the Moment Studio has helped Pepsi accomplish its goal
of reaching 20 million Facebook users per week.
"We've been big component of real-time marketing," Mr. Singh
said. "When Ian [Schafer] started talking about the Moment Studio
and real-time marketing it seemed like the stars aligned."
Deep Focus is also reporting above average engagement rates on
its own.
Moment Studio has, on average, increased the virality -- the
percentage of Facebook users who see a brand post and then create a
story based on it -- of its clients' Facebook posts by 335%, Mr.
Schafer said, and that translates into showing up in more people's
news feeds.
Additionally, the studio has also lifted overall page engagement
rates 150%, and in some cases, its delivered an overall page reach
that is five times larger than the number of likes a brand acquired
over a 30-day span.
Despite the newsroom moniker, Moment Studio is not delving into
serious journalism. Most of the posts it generates are about the
Pepsi-sponsored show "The X Factor" or Instagram photos of dogs and
employees holding Pepsi cans. (Think BuzzFeed, not CNN.)
For now, Moment Studio is not available as a stand-alone
product, but Mr. Schafer is hoping to change that soon.
