With the help of top brass at media agencies across the country, strategy uncovered the brightest young media minds – the next-gen strategists and planners who are breaking new ground, taking campaigns to the next level and delivering results. Today’s bright lights shine on Dentsu’s interactive communications manager, Min Ryuck. The Next Media Star winner will be chosen by our Media Agency of the Year jury and announced in strategy‘s November issue.
Claim to Fame
When Dentsu Canada helped launch the Lexus IS F in March 2008, their challenge was to position the IS series in the performance segment – its first foray into the category. To target younger, luxury-buying auto enthusiasts, Lexus had to make a splash to build wider appeal for the brand. So, Min Ryuck, interactive communications manager at Dentsu, decided to steer the interactive portion of the campaign in a new direction, driving Lexus into the mobile space for the first time.
The creative work focused on what the IS F’s packing under the hood, with visualizations of its performance engine showcased in the campaign. The effort consisted of a mobile site and ads, and mirrored a digital strategy including a website, full-page takeovers on major car sites and portals like Sympatico and Yahoo, and video placements. Ryuck and her team used Lexus’ foray into mobile to learn about consumer behaviours and perceptions towards media placements in the space.
‘[The mobile component] was a great way for us to test the medium given the assets that we had from a creative standpoint,’ explains Ryuck. ‘We found that the videos [of engine visualizations and the IS F on a racetrack] were a key highlight and helped to elevate how long and how many pages within the mobile site people would interact with, which was a key insight for us in terms of learning.’
The campaign resulted in increased traffic to the website, with the mobile component exhibiting performance 106% higher than traditional online display advertising.
It’s just one of the innovative interactive efforts that Ryuck has managed. She also adeptly tapped social media for Canon Canada’s ‘Tell Your Story’ campaign in February 2008, to create emotional connections with the brand’s point-and-shoot cameras by embracing people’s propensity for sharing stories. Ryuck leveraged sites like Facebook and YTV.com with content based on photo stories, such as the story of a child’s first snowball told through a series of snaps, to reach the key target of mothers, tweens and photo enthusiasts.
It all drove aspiring photographers to the Canon website where they could upload photos and create their own stories for the chance to win a Canon camera or printer. Contest pages were also run within sites like Todaysparent.com and Chatelaine.com, and the best photo story submitted was used in a Canon ad. The effort earned a Direct Marketing Association Best of Show award and a Gold for Best Integrated Campaign.
In June 2008, Ryuck spearheaded a successful initiative for Scope. Her task was to extend the brand, a staid product, from the traditional female target to 18- to 34-year-old males.
So, armed with the insight that fresh breath is top of mind when meeting new people, Ryuck again targeted online social settings with content driving back to Scope’s website Testyourbreath.ca, which let visitors test the noxiousness of their breath by typing in what they had eaten that day and then seeing the results on a metre that ranged from head explosions to rhino poop. The online destinations included nightclub websites and social networks like Facebook, on which sponsored stories (interactive banner ads) that drove back to Scope’s website were featured in targeted newsfeeds.
‘The strategy was to seed the website into blogs and into other ad community websites to get people to the site virally with no media support,’ says Ryuck.
The campaign resulted in a 118% increase in traffic on the Scope website and over-delivered on impressions by 148%.
The rundown on Ryuck
Digital wasn’t always Ryuck’s bread and butter; it was something she fell into. Ryuck, 29, graduated from York University with a bachelor in administration specializing in marketing and economics and began working in telecommunications on direct marketing campaigns. She eventually landed at Wunderman as a media coordinator, where she worked for five years on clients like AT&T, Ford, Microsoft and Kraft, again in direct marketing.
It was at Wunderman where Ryuck first dipped her toe into the digital pool and that experience ultimately led her to her current role at Dentsu, where she started working on the Toyota and Lexus accounts over three years ago.
‘They didn’t have an interactive department so I started doing all of the interactive communications planning for Toyota, Lexus, as well as Canon, P&G and basically every other client that we have,’ explains Ryuck.
The rest is history.
How do you go about improving on your past campaigns?
‘With my clients it’s always, ‘we need to test this,’ because otherwise, if you don’t test it, your competitors will. And they’ll be way ahead of you in terms of how you’re communicating with their consumers. So for me, testing new things is how you’re going to get your learning and improve on campaigns.’
