Business Case performed by Vini Apoena at HSM in São Paulo, Brazil from June-2016 to March-2018 as Managing Director of the T/bt Group.
I love working in education businesses.
There's a sense of legacy & impact that I never felt in any other market category.
It makes me feel fulfilled.
I was fortunate enough to help build digital ticket sales for not just 1 but 2 main events at HSM - and many other collateral products. The partnership was so successful because of the plaint trust and alignment that was the highlight of our execution.
Between creative work, technological deployments, (a lot of) ad-writing & weekly trips to the countryside, the team opened the first digital doors to HSM.
I'm very proud of the business we did there.
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1. Concept & analyze innovative assets in order to advance HSM communications by bringing new & integrated technologies that could help the company achieve higher levels of sales transactions through digital channels — including ensuring that procedures adopted to reach those levels are registered & liable to reproduced.
2. Create & produce competitive audiovisual content to be posted over social media & other visual media channels, helping the brand appear more relatable to new & younger audiences that may be enabled to buy tickets.
3. Take part in an Executive Work Group with high management directors that were set to provide agility & resources, so all digital marketing activities could be released in a faster way than it was previously delivered.
4. Set a budget perspective that could enable tests & hiring of new technologies without overspending or underspending the project, while providing world-class advancements to the HSM business model over digital channels.
5. Structure a new set of reports & frequency for strategy reviews that could keep up with the pace of digital channels while providing high-level insights to the Work Group — focusing especially on live dashboards and daily improvements.
The lack of renewing was that kind of time bomb a company may take some time to acknowledge. Besides bringing new people, HSM needed to bring diversity to the center of their stage. White man, 40+ was the main visitor at the time.
Talking about diversity may sound unpopular with some groups. I don't care. It must be something that we talk about in every project we deal with.
Diversity is all about solidity. We can't be competitive without a fair representation of consumers working in these projects that are all about - consumers.
HSM welcomed the diversity talk to the table. Their management allowed the creative minds behind our concepts to start thinking about how we would be able to transform the social fabric of the people attending HSM events.
Whenever we start talking about messages, some people think we left the performance talk. Let me tell you: performance is all about the message. Keep it this way and you'll succeed.
The tool that allows your message to be delivered multiple times a day, everywhere, also allows your competitor to do the same. The differentiation in performance media isn't about the technology - but the message. It takes 1 or 2 people to start a digital media buying structure but it takes every drop of creativity, context & madness to write a convincing piece of content/advertising.
It's important to set an advanced digital media operation. But it's also important to bring minds that are privileged to see the social trends booming out there - so the campaign being managed doesn't sound alienated.
We draw a digital media buying structure that could be able to invest, analyze & improve our efforts overall points of contact. It's was essential to build a collateral infra to help our people identify prospects all the way through the conversion journey - by collateral I mean CRM.
We choose Sprout Social at that time. I couldn't say that it smoothly worked out for us. I think there are better options today & it really depends on where the company needs to go or how deeply we need to see the data being generated by users.
It was also produced a limited series with 5 episodes called Boiling Knowledge which featured unheard voices from the executive world. We brought successful disabled entrepreneurs, black voices, big-tech leaders & popular thinkers that were usually silenced on corporate advertising.
We also produced a limited series called Selfie Take in which b2b influencers were invited to share their thoughts about HSM events & what they have learned, the business deals they closed on the event.
Weekly managing meetings were part of the fixed calendar. We also added a bi-weekly meeting with the HSM C-level. The focus was to approve creative concepts, present new technologies being introduced into the digital media operation & help to clarify potential issues so HSM got a better understanding of everything we were developing.
I would say that starting the workgroup that was working to renew HSM Expo really did a huge difference. Especially because we got the freedom necessary to do what was necessary. Everybody knew what we were doing. Transparency took us beyond.
We hired specialized professionals to take over the entire execution foreseen on the strategy book. They started from scratch by auditing all platforms & investments - which is something that I largely advise you to do before starting any new project with a company. The digital advertising industry didn't hit the point where all professionals have the same kind of procedures. So you may find some issues to address before start operating.
The series was overwhelmingly welcomed pushing thousands of views. It helped raise product awareness not just for the regular audience but also including a broader set of people that were also qualified to buy tickets &, in many cases, for the first time considered visit an event from HSM.
We kept in touch with the ground operation. Over HSM there were so many events happening & they were so rich for marketers to really talk to customers, understand the reasons why, if they are liking the product & if it's what they were expecting. I would say it's one of the most important tasks: keep in touch with the customers. Especially the newest ones.
1. Groundbreaking programmatic media managed with partnered trading desks started flowing qualified traffic to HSM digital platforms. It's possible but very hard to convert high-end products just with digital journeys. We did it for HSM. While Google was responsible for last-click conversions over general leads, Linkedin was essential for the brand to build different points of relevance throughout the fiscal year. With an Ambassador strategy pushed by paid media, the operation was able to build different types of conversion vectors.
2. While showing a renewed audience with a more inclusive appeal, HSM was able to be in the vanguard of the racial & gender issue - because the entire speech for the campaign was designed to include multiracial voices raising reasonable social issues.
3. We launched a monthly Work Group with the President, Sales & Marketing Director of HSM. Their main work was 1. to get the approvals for the unprecedented creative efforts that were being deployed and could cause discomfort to some managers and 2. keep up with all the accountability & metrics that we were proving for the business to advance in the field. The committee found itself helpful especially to clarify & bring understanding to executives that masters their fields but needed some help in order better navigate unknown paths.
4. Return over investment for HSM '16 reached 158% when compared with the total spending. Dozens of tickets were sold through unprecedented ways - bringing new types of consumers to the engaged client base.
5. HSM started working with new reporting tools like dashboards, mail-in digital reports & active daily feedback that was settled to improve feedback accuracy & frequency. While the amount & variety of metrics may leave some managers with a weird sense of not understanding, we were able to cease this feeling by providing on-demand knowledge and ready-to-answer channels so every single member of the team got access to the proper support.
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