NEW YORK ? A Gap executive at the 2015 Integrated Marketing Week cautioned marketers to pay attention to the fluctuation of data and metrics that can occur throughout an event or campaign as showcased by one of the retailer's campaigns that went viral. 

During the apparel brand?s Make Love campaign in 2013, a print advertisement was vandalized in a New York subway with racist graffiti. After a social media user posted an image of the ad, consumer data altered as the image went viral, forcing Gap to step in and take control of the situation. 

"We were used to tracking sentiment on social so this is something where we really expected sentiment to fall during this period," said Sumit Kumar, global director of marketing strategy and analytics at Gap. "But what we actually noticed that the sentiment was not really moving too much. But what was in deed moving was the volume, the volume of sharing. 

"People were tremendously sharing this particular incident on social media, on Twitter and it went viral," he said. "So basically my team and social analytics caught wind of this and we let the media team know and they physically found out which subway it was where this act that happened. 

"We were able to go and replace the ad with a better ad. So we started to think really hard about the use of metrics and how we track things. You see this big spike, and that is a spike on social volume."

Integrated Marketing Week is organized by the Direct Marketing Association. 

Viral marketing
In October of 2013, Gap noticed the image on Twitter of its Make Love advertisement located in a subway in New York City featuring Sikh model Waris Ahluwalia. The ad was defaced with racist remarks reading, ?please stop driving taxis,? and text was altered from ?Make Love? to ?Make Bombs.?

At this time, the brand noticed that its brand sentiment was stagnant. Brand sentiment details how much consumers love a brand, or how much positivity surrounds the brand.

After further investigation, it was clear that although sentiment had not changed, engagement was up. The image had gone viral and users on social media were widely spreading the image and campaign.

It was the brand?s reaction that caused the campaign to turn from a viral sensation to an event securing a favorable image for Gap. Team members from Gap contacted the original user who shared the photo and asked for the exact location of the ad.

The apparel brand replaced the advertisement, but also changed its Twitter background to the original image of Mr. Ahluwalia in support of Sikhs, Muslims and the model. It was at this point where data surrounding brand sentiment skyrocketed.

"If I showed the chart on sentiment, that was kind of relatively constant," Mr. Kumar said. "But a few days later is when we started to see the actual sentiment rise because that is when people started to rally around the action that Gap took in replacing the ad and stood by the cause. 

"We even gave a statement about inclusion and how democratic the brand is," he said. 

Consumers were touched by the reaction of Gap and in turn, its representation became an authentic and positive brand image in their eyes. Social media can be a double-edged sword for a brand, but if used correctly, can create a solid bond with consumers and this is a clear example of that.

Integrated business
Mr. Kumar detailed how successes such as the one experienced by Gap can be accomplished through an integrated marketing team. Data analytics should be looked at as a whole to determine which facet of data is most important to focus on, with the entire team.

The executive also stressed that different silos within a business looking at different data can cause disconnect with consumers. It is important that the entire marketing team is focusing on the same data that the brand feels is the most vital, rather than have conflicting ideals. 

Through working as a team and paying attention to data, Gap was able to rectify the situation and come out on top, in consumer views. 

Gap knows that the more consumers feel strong a connection to a brand the more they are likely to spend and shop with them. 

"We have to almost break the internal silos," Mr. Kumar said. "In most businesses that I have been apart of in the last few years have faced similar things. 

"The online teams are organized separately and the physical specialty retail teams are organized separately and they are looking at different metrics and at the end of the day they are all trying to align towards one common one and no one really knows what that is," he said. "So I think it really is that top layer.

"There is a lot of bottom layer, lots of metrics depending on what your role is in marketing. But what is everything aligning to, what is that top line metric, It is not just the fact that there is a lot of data and spread it sporadically but it is also aligning them together."

Final take
Brielle Jaekel is editorial assistant at Mobile Marketer