While Ellen DeGeneres was busy breaking Twitter with the singlemost retweeted picture in history, as a fortunate bi-product of Samsung product placement, most major brands were only partially engaging with an audience that found itself at a fever-pitch. Real time marketing is a hot topic for 2014 and while it remains inexorably linked to a biscuit, thanks to Oreo’s memorable Superbowl offering, that’s proof that it’s not quite blossomed out to its full potential.

Oreo's genre defining offering.


Arby’s, the American food outlet, stole an early lead in the field for 2014 with its Grammys stealing comments on musician-of-the-moment Pharrell Williams’ unusual hat and its uncanny likeness to their logo. The brand moved on to cement their relationship by then purchasing the hat when it was sold for charity by Pharrell and even managed to insert themselves into the Oscars buzz thanks to Williams’ nomination for the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack.

With the spectacular space setting for Gravity generating a lot of the excitement around the visuals in cinema in the build up to the Oscars, NASA was presented with a comfortable opportunity to let its content do the talking. Sharing remarkable vistas of the cosmos, NASA was able to present one of the most coherent and inspiring brand experiences of the night.

NASA  sharing its images of space under the #realgravity hashtag. 


NASA’s ability to share from their library of images and still create interest was an attribute sadly lacked by some of the stock-image posts from brands that fell flat. At least though they were on topic; as some brands had pre-bought social space, or in this case “#jennifer lawrence”, with no intention of mentioning the American Hustle star. Which is strange in itself, as their audience was mentioning just that.

At this stage in its development the practice of Real Time Marketing will see its fair share of missteps and also landmarks, so the need for inspiring leaders becomes crucial. At the moment most real time marketing efforts garner less than 100 shares and most marketers surveyed would describe themselves as ill-equipped or unsupported.

However with the likes of Urban Airship this period of uncertainty and nervousness may be set to end, as the Wall Street Journal explains:

Today at Mobile World Congress, Urban Airship unveiled its next-generation solution combining high-performance push messaging with real-time mobile marketing automation, dynamic audience segmentation and iBeacon targeting. Available this quarter, the solution offers an evolutionary step forward in the ability of marketers and product teams to drive more real-time, relevant and responsive mobile experiences that delight customers and keep them loyal.
For the first time in the industry, every swipe on a push message, tap on a landing page, or proximity to an iBeacon can build richer mobile audience segments for better targeting and deeper personalization over time. For example, a shopper might walk into a children's clothing department triggering an iBeacon message with seasonal specials, and also become part of a children's clothing audience segment for a back-to-school campaign later that year.


Real Time Marketing certainly makes itself an outstanding argument as one of the richest frontiers for exploration for brands looking to engage with the first generation raised on Tumblr’s cross-media scavenging and unstoppable torrent of memes.  With major players already staking their interest and year that’s ripe with events, including an especially exciting Brazil-based World Cup, by this time next year there could be more in the hall of fame than a solitary Oreo.