Reactive Content for the Great British Bake Off

Reactive content is a way for brands or charities to take advantage of popular events or spontaneous moments. Given the world we live in, these events will more than likely be piggybacked on offline in terms of promotions and discounts, but reactive content can exist online, too. Give its very nature, reactive content can be created for planned or unplanned events. If there’s a particularly juicy, embarrassing or interesting moment that appears out of the ether and is begging to be exploited and used for content, then why not create some last minute, unplanned, reactive content. For example we created this #piggatefilm when it was revealed that David Cameron had invaded a pig head’s personal space with his prime ministerial private parts. The planned content is as it suggests, planned. Normally dates will be added to a dairy and content will be created around that event that will help leverage your charity or brand. Bare in mind though, if you are looking to take advantage of a particular event or social moment you can’t just lazily shoehorn content in – there is an art to it. So here’s how we do it. For any bakery enthusiast the Great British Bake Off Final was 7th October, and it was a biggy. The event amassed around 13.4 million TV viewers and trended hard on social channels, which we predicted it would. So prior to the final we created a .gif for Save the Children that combined GBBO footage with footage of their charity teams baking 17.5 metric tonsbread to feed hundreds of people in refugee camps – a more serious bakery task. If you’re reading this and thinking how reactive content seems like too much of an effort or risk, here are the reasons why you should be getting your calendar out and pencilling in those dates.

1. It will keep your brand/charity relevant: We hate to use the words but brands and charities need to keep their ‘finger on the pulse’, and reactive content allows you to demonstrate that you do this.
2. It helps you connect with new customers, volunteers, donators: Reactive content will help you make new friends; as long as the content is relevant to whatever is trending. If you try and force yourself into a social conversation you are only going to get called out, in the same way that no one likes the guy who adds something irrelevant to the conversation just so his voice can be heard. Don’t be that guy.
3. It will give you an excuse to reintroduce achievements or aspects of your brand you would like to should about. In an ideal world your achievements would be in constant circulation in the press and your audience will always be aware of your work, unfortunately life isn’t that easy. This is particularly relevant to charities whose work may go unnoticed once the public’s fickle eye moves on to the next newsworthy disaster. However rather than letting all that hard work vanish into thin air from the population’s mind reactive content allows you to reintroduce that work back into the media.