With conferences, showroom visits, and other in-person experiences shut down for the foreseeable future due to COVID-19, marketing teams are finding creative ways to deliver powerful virtual experiences instead. In fact, some of them are using the Ceros platform as their primary rapid response tool, migrating their real-life events to the digital space or conveying critical, up-to-date information virtually.
When we heard about how some of our brand partners were using Ceros to engage clients and partners online, we reached out to find out more. Here are their stories.
GumGum
The creative team at GumGum, an artificial intelligence company focused on computer vision, has been using Ceros for over four years to create interactive digital experiences that supplement their in-person marketing efforts. That IRL marketing still made up a majority of the team’s efforts, according to Som Puangladda, GumGum’s vice president of global marketing.
“70% of our marketing strategy is tied to events,” she said. “Last year, we did 275 events, anything from small, local happy hours to big conferences like CES.”
So with a significant amount of the company’s usual business vaporized this spring, the team had to find ways to reconnect with their usual attendees and try to recoup what it would be losing. As Ceros clients, GumGum was well-equipped to handle quick turnaround times for experiential digital projects. And that’s a good thing during this pandemic, because acting fast is paramount.
Early on in the quarantine, they spun up this interactive experience to stay connected to its audience. Som said that the reaction she got from fellow marketers was astounding.
See GumGum’s full experience here
“During this time, Ceros has bypassed Hubspot and Salesforce as the most critical tool for us,” Puangladda said. “The feedback that we’ve gotten (on the experience above) was crazy. They couldn’t believe that we whipped this up in week two of the lockdown.”
Som says that the team has plans to migrate some in-person experiences—like live workout classes or meditation classes, which can be conducted online—to virtual experiences, using tools like Ceros and Splash.
West Monroe Partners
WMP spent the first quarter of 2020 planning for a full website refresh, with the new look slated to release in early April. The coronavirus pandemic, well, altered things slightly, and that timeline has been pushed back. That’s not a big problem in itself, but the WMP team had been dialing back its Q1 content so that they wouldn’t have to retroactively change too much. Due to the pandemic, they had to start creating content—and fast.
Thankfully, WMP had the tools they needed to adjust. For the past 18 months or so, they’ve used Ceros to create “quick polls,” brief questionnaires that they brought to life with interactivity and animation. Christina Galoozis, senior manager of external communications, decided to spin one up quickly about the market crisis caused by the global pandemic. She got to work on the data and questions that they’d ask 150 C-suite execs, while Madison Sullivan, senior specialist of visual design, worked on the graphics.
See WMP’s full experience here
“It took about a week to publish, and that includes writing the questionnaire and getting the data,” Galoozis said. “I think that Ceros has greatly enabled us to do these quick polls better than we used to.”
Additionally, the pandemic has given rise to new Ceros requests for WMP’s design team. For some of WMP’s larger clients, Sullivan’s team creates annual reports in Ceros that summarizes the client’s relationship with WMP in an interactive, engaging package. Recently, Sullivan has gotten requests to create Ceros recap experiences for regular meetings, not just annual meetings.
For West Monroe’s creative team, any chance to improve the online experience for their audience is one they’ll take.“People are looking at screens all day long,” Galoozis said. “The more that we can engage, and not just have an endless scroll of text on a page, the better off we’ll be.”
Haworth
Few companies have a more impressive collection of showrooms than the global office furniture company Haworth. Twenty-two inviting, perfectly-curated spaces—in Houston, Chicago, Berlin, New York, Kuala Lumpur, and so on—each of which would make Roger Sterling drool. But what happens when those amazing spaces are empty, useless, off-limits to the clients they were built to inspire?
If you’re Jill Stewart, Haworth’s head of North American sales operations, you inspire them with Ceros. Stewart is transforming the way she connects with prospective clients, particularly ones who can’t wait for showrooms to reopen before they make a decision between Haworth and their competitors. “We had to bring that experience to them virtually,” she says. “We had to transform even what the invites look like.”
Two months ago, those clients might have received a high quality, smartly-designed paper invite to their showroom via FedEx. Now, they get an invite in Outlook. But Haworth’s invite is not just an invite.“Can you inject beauty in an email?” Stewart asked. They did. Haworth’s invite is a compelling Ceros banner / experience embedded in Outlook, which takes you through to the drone’s eye tour. ”We virtually fly through one of our showrooms.”
Stewart recognized the importance of standing apart from a sea of emails with Zoom links, so she embedded a Ceros experience in her email. “We wanted to set ourselves apart to say that everything you’re about to walk this entire journey with us is going to feel different, and it’s gonna feel good, right?” She sighs. “We all need good right now.”
Stewart continued, “Ceros affords us the ability to change how we communicate. So everyone’s on Zoom right now, but also, everyone is innately wired to want beauty and positivity. So how do you change the experience? It has to be something thoughtful. It has to be engaging. And that’s what Ceros has afforded us.”
