In 2015 we developed a ground-breaking video personalisation platform, EchoMany, which has become an essential platform for key clients across a number of industries wanting to reward their fans, delight their customers and amplify their social media marketing campaigns. EchoMany is able to extract public social data (text, photo or video) and then dynamically embed this into a video - in real time - with videos rendering in the cloud and being delivered back natively to the social platform of origin.

The tool has been particularly popular within the not-for-profit sector, as clients have the opportunity to respond to their volunteers, fundraisers and donors with personalised messages of thanks or encouragement as a reward. Our client, Cancer Research UK, wanted to increase engagement and positive sentiment by creating real conversations with their fundraisers, and showing their gratitude. Secondarily, they wanted to be able to raise awareness of their Race For Life series nationwide by creating highly shareable personalised assets for anyone publicly tweeting that they had signed up to run.

EchoMany is designed to ensure that marketing campaigns receive maximum amplification and positive sentiment by engaging people in 1-2-1 conversations. Rather than simply broadcasting ads that can be overlooked, ignored or blocked, the goal is to deliver content that encourages organic amplification. The direct, conversational delivery of EchoMany's personalised videos natively within Twitter practically ensures viewability and avoids the ad-block problem entirely, whilst increasing positive sentiment and encouraging shares due to its 'surprise and delight' factor.

Cancer Research UK was already advertising Race For Life online and on TV, and promoting the #PinkArmy hashtag along with these efforts. The EchoMany campaign was therefore designed to monitor the #PinkArmy hashtag live via the Twitter streaming API, pulling through tweets featuring this hashtag onto a web-based dashboard. Additionally, a natural language search option meant that users engaging with the brand, or mentioning other campaign-related hashtags like #PrettyMuddy or #RaceForLife could also be tracked and receive personalised replies.

The dashboard is intuitive, easy to use and gives a broad range of options for filtering out undesirable content - e.g. Tweets using profanity, brand new accounts or low follower counts. Therefore all Tweets could be easily monitored and curated by the Race for Life social media team to preserve brand integrity and maximise the potential reach of a Tweet selected for a reply.

Once logged into the dashboard, the Race for Life social media team could select any Tweet which met their search criteria and instantly create, check and send a personalised "Thank you!" video reply directly from the @RaceForLife handle. The Twitter user would then receive a Twitter notification taking them to a native, autoplay personalised video for them to 'Like', 'Retweet' and Share at their discretion.

There were 4 unique, personalised video templates created by Redberry Digital and integrated into our EchoMany platform, each one dynamically personalised. The first video thanked volunteers for signing up for Race for Life, the second thanked them for completing the race, the third was specific to those competitors entering Pretty Muddy races and the fourth and final video included each volunteer's fundraising total along with their thank you message.

The videos automatically embedded some or all of the user's @Handle, Name, Avatar, posted pictures and tweet text, depending upon the creative execution for that particular video. We designed each video to make sure there was a personalised element within the first few frames/seconds to capture attention and encourage view-through.

Enhanced personalisation options were made available to the Race for Life social media team allowing them to manually edit additional elements such as the fundraising totals, as well as the ability to modify the text of the tweet that would accompany the video response. This meant that the Race for Life social media team had the freedom to make each reply completely unique, further enhancing the conversational 1-2-1 engagement that the campaign strived for.

Personalised versions of the TV ad that were sent out encouraged 5 times the average account engagement, with engagement averaging 309% higher than the previous months over the course of all four videos. Positive sentiment was reflected in peak 'Like' rates of 81% and up to 66% 'Retweet' rates.

In addition to this, Hayley Fairclough, Race for Life's Social Media Manager, has said; "Rewarding our supporters was one of our key aims for this year, and using EchoMany videos really helped us do that. It automated the whole process, with the use of personal touches (like their name, fundraising total) ensuring supporters really engaged with the content and felt valued. We even had a few supporters requesting them specifically, or asking for one for their friend! The team were really easy to work with and nothing was deemed too much for them to tackle, and at impressive speeds – this really helped us be reactive to what our audience were talking about most at the time".

Altogether EchoMany works as an effective enhancement to paid social advertising by driving deeper engagement and adding a layer of organic amplification that makes media assets 'work harder' and improve the Return on Media Investment.