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In a world where the possibilities to engage with consumers are only increasing, it is time for marketers to utilise a DMP and effectively invest marketing budget.
Computer manufacturer Lenovo has recently launched a campaign on the web called Pitch To Her, to empower rural girls through technology.
Though this is an India-specific campaign, it has seen a lot of interest from organisations and individuals from across the world – such as UN Women, UN Women Australia, Girls Not Brides, Adrianne Owings, Half the Sky Mvmt and Democracy Watch News.
The campaign is bringing to global attention YUWA, a social development platform for girls based in Jharkhand that imparts training in football, provides free education and creates awareness about social evils.
Hailing from the village of Hutup in Jharkhand, the YUWA girls are from a part of society where six out of ten girls are forced to drop out of school and become child brides. The girls came into the limelight on a national level in 2013 by bagging the bronze medal at the Gasteiz Cup in Spain. In 2014, they were invited to participate in the USA Cup.
This year, the mission taken up by YUWA and Lenovo is to empower the girls with technological knowledge that will propel them towards a smarter world. YUWA India Trust has therefore partnered with Lenovo to launch the national campaign, Pitch to Her, calling the brightest minds in India to enter ideas to ‘hack real world issues’.
As part of the project, the girls are using photography to show the world where they live and what they love. They are using 360-degree cameras to create a Google Maps Street View of their village: The YUWA girls put their village on Google Street View
Hutup does not even feature on the internet, so the first thing the girls are doing is to create a Wikipedia page, describing local facts and famous places, which they then aim to add to a detailed Wiki entry, along with pictures geo-tagged on the map: YUWA Girls Put Hutup on Wikipedia
While the girls were busy being introduced to and tinkering with technology, Lenovo captured their activity, made content articles and shared them for the world to see and invited the social audience to pitch cool ideas to the girls.
By mid-August, the campaign had led to:
This is a strong case of how brands in India and across the globe are moving from baseline to cause or hack marketing and engaging influencers to create real time content. Bhaskar Choudhuri, director, marketing, Lenovo India, said: “We are proud of our association with the YUWA girls. Despite hailing from a small town, they have the required firepower and understand that technology gives them the required platform to achieve their dreams. The primary objective of ‘Pitch to Her’ is to engage young individuals towards empowering the YUWA girls and in a way create an unforgettable, fun experience for these volunteers.”
The campaign ends on September 12.
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Many retailers are harming their ability to appear in natural retail search results as most of their websites are not mobile friendly, are hard to use and are consequently limiting their traffic, according to a new study.
The research, by direct and digital agency Equimedia, shows – perhaps unsurprisingly – that mums are time-poor and want quick and easy access to products and services online.
They run their lives on their smartphones; 52% of all visits to retail websites came from mobile devices, surpassing desktop traffic for the first time. Yet, retailers fail to tap into this effectively.
Equimedia surveyed 65 leading mother, baby and child retailer websites and looked at specific attributes that can significantly affect their ability to rank in natural search results on all devices, and especially on smartphones. The common problems found were:
– 26% of the leading retail sites homepages are not mobile device friendly, according to Google;
– 32% of sites served content wider than a smartphone screen size making usage difficult;
– 91% had buttons that were judged to be too close together to use on a smartphone;
– 26% served content that was too small to read on a smartphone;
– 78% could do more to improve page load times with 32% needing to make significant improvements;
– 40% had page titles that were too long, 29% had meta descriptions that were too long and 9% had no meta description at all.
Equimedia Group chief operating officer, Louise Burgess (pictured left), said: “Google’s recent overhaul of its mobile algorithm has shaken up mobile search results and made it crucially important that retailers ensure their sites are mobile friendly if they want to get their fair share of relevant mobile site visitors and the revenue they bring.
“In the industry sector we looked at, younger generations of expectant and new mums demand sites to be accessible and usable on all devices and will leave if a site doesn’t perform well.
“If brands are to keep pace with the expectations of their ever-changing audiences and maximise online revenues from the UK’s youngest mums as they become affluent over time, they will need to improve page load speeds, provide mobile compatible sites that are easier to read and navigate, and crucially, improve their sales funnels so that buying products using a smartphone is much easier.”
The whitepaper detailing the survey results and information on how to improve a retail site’s ability deliver to its target market’s expectations is available for download from the Equimedia website >
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