This year’s New Gen Trends in Marketing and Tech Conference is sponsored by Blue Robot. Kyle Oosthuizen, Chief Executive Officer at Blue Robot, discusses the company’s partnership with New Gen, why gamification is an effective marketing tool and how brands can truly connect with their customers. Modern Marketing is a proud media partner of the New Gen Trends in Marketing and Tech Conference.
The New Gen Trends in Marketing and Tech Conference is hosted by ‘The New Generation Awards’. Taking place Tuesday, 26 May at The Venue in Melrose Arch, the conference will feature nine leading influencers from the corporate and agency sectors, including recipients of last year’s New Generation Awards, who collectively earned over 40 accolades.
For full event details and ticket fees, click here. To book your seats email: stephen@newgenawards.co.za.
1. Why did Blue Robot get involved as a sponsor of this year’s New Gen Trends in Marketing and Tech Conference?
We entered the New Generation awards last year, and we saw it as a platform that gives opportunities for great work to be celebrated. There’s a lot of discussion about pushing the industry forward, but the New Generation Awards is a chance for that work to actually be showcased.
Many people speak about active engagement and innovation, but that’s not what you see on social media, and there’s a big disconnect. Many social media ads are just about buying a product and consumers will forget 99% of those ads instantly.
But when you speak to the teams behind those ads, they’ll tell you that they want to do creative and innovative work. So it’s up to all of us to challenge ourselves and live up to what we’re saying.
2. What value will Blue Robot bring to the partnership?
We bring a unique perspective. There are creative agencies, media agencies, marketing teams and brands. But as a tech enabler, there’s not really a category that Blue Robot fits into. So we get to work with all brands, not just a client of record. We’ve worked with global clients and we can see what works in different countries and where the industry is heading. Because we remove that barrier between great ideas and budget constraints, we get to deliver a lot of great work and it gives us a unique approach.
3. New Gen aims to ignite a spirit of excellence and challenge participants to push the boundaries of innovation. How is Blue Robot pushing the boundaries of innovation?
We’ve transformed the business over the last couple of years to allow agencies and brands to push the boundaries without the necessary timelines and budgets that come with it. We also offer gamified and interactive rich media banners on programmatic advertising, AR and VR models, microsites, as well as building games and some of the safety tools for X.
4. Why is gamification an effective marketing platform?
Blue Robot’s mission is to move people from passive to active attention. So gamification fits in there perfectly. If you serve an ad to a user or a human being, you’re speaking at them. You’re telling them, ‘go buy my product. This is why my product is great’.
But when you offer consumers a game, you’re inviting them to experience something. It taps into people’s competitive nature of wanting to climb a leaderboard against friends, family and random people on the internet. People love that competitive edge and it’s something that they get to experience. They become part of a bigger community playing that game.
We believe you need nine seconds of a user’s attention to drive brand recall. If there’s a static ad or even a video that gets two or three seconds of attention, it’s impossible to do that. But by playing the branded game, the brand gets remembered and people speak about the game. That drives brand favourability and brand recall.
5. What are your top tips for brands to truly connect with and engage their customers? How do you get from brand like to brand love?
Static engagement, shares, likes, views, etc. are not true measurement of brand connection. You need to measure the quality or active engagements.
So things like: what did the user physically do to engage with you as a brand? Did you invite them in or did you just serve them an ad, speak to them and then they moved on with their lives? What we generally ask agencies or marketing teams is: can you remember a single ad that you’ve seen in the last day or seven days?
No one’s actually been able to answer that question, which means a thousand ads (some people estimate it to be between 4 and 10,000) could be served to people on a daily basis in South Africa, but if you can’t remember a single ad, that means the static content isn’t driving brand recall.
Don’t measure on the static engagements that look correct in Excel. Find your real measure of brand love or engagement that you want from users, and then invite them to experience something with you. The user has to get something out of it.
One of our core company values is ‘user first’. So we design something that the user will enjoy, and then we focus on what the brand will get out of it. That allows us to really get the user to engage, build brand love, and then to be relevant and consistent as well.
There’s no point in launching one standout campaign a year and then spending the rest of the year asking consumers to buy your product. It’s about being consistent, inviting them in, and sharing that experience with them.
Brand building is a long-term exercise. What people are saying when you aren’t speaking to them or when you aren’t in the room: that’s really what your brand is.
6. Looking holistically at social media content, the majority seems generic and companies can get lost in a ‘sea of sameness’. Do you think brands are playing it too safe with their content for fear of not offending their audiences and being ‘cancelled’?
It’s the easiest it’s ever been to create thousands of variations of an ad or to create static ads, which doesn’t help in terms of differentiation.
There’s also deadlines, pressure, and under-resourced teams. It’s not that people don’t want to be innovative, there is a systematic problem that’s pushing content that is too safe. Agencies want to push the biggest, best and the most innovative work, but they can’t necessarily get it approved or there’s not enough budget etc. So the process needs to be fixed.
7. Is AI enhancing brand content, or is it contributing to the ’sea of sameness’ mentioned above?
It’s really about how you use it. If you have an average or weak strategy, AI just amplifies that. Weak ideas are getting out there quicker and at larger scale, so AI hasn’t created the problem, it has just amplified an existing problem.
But if you have a great and innovative idea, AI will amplify that as well and remove barriers for you. The best ideas still win.
8. What are Blue Robot’s plans for 2026?
We are re-establishing our presence in Kenya with a new office. Then our big focus for the next four years will be Europe, with launches in Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and France. We’ve worked in 27 countries, so we can scale to any market in the world because advertising happens in every market. Our key offerings scale very well in those regions and we’ve identified them based on historic campaigns and relationships that we’ve had.
Blue Robot started just over 10 years ago, and we were in the social media space for the first eight or nine years. The solutions that we could offer clients were limited to social media and this limited our participation in the full digital advertising landscape.
Our bluematic division touches on programmatic, rich media, display banners, as well as digital out of home.
We’ve launched an independent division, EGG studios, which handles anything that isn’t programmatic or social media that fits in that model. We entered the New Generation Awards in the first place to celebrate EGG studios campaigns to show where we’re pushing the boundaries and where we are innovative.
Because of our expansion, when we work with an agency or marketing team, we can give them a solution no matter the platform.
BLUE ROBOT
https://www.bluerobot.com/
NEW GEN TRENDS CONFERENCE
www.newgenawards.co.za/pages/marketing-conference
