I’m fairly certain I don’t even need to describe this ad, I think everyone knows it. My 10-year old son will even sigh when he hears it now.
What I learned from the AdFreak post is that there are actually several websites hosting rants about this ad (e.g. Consumerist, Esquire). One quote the post cited: “It makes me want to kill someone/never ever buy a Toyota.”
Now, you know you’ve done something wrong when something like this happens.
I am NOT one to subscribe to “any publicity is good publicity.” I think you need to respect your audience and deliver a message that they actually want to hear - something they can connect with, that will move them to act. Maybe the idea of 0% financing is a good one - but delivery is everything.
Tell me how this ad moves somebody to act? (besides to rant on websites, or declare they’ll never buy a Toyota, or threaten suicide)
The next installment in my favorite movie series, Saw V, comes to theaters this Friday, October 24th. Let me tell you how a unique tool used in its promotion blows my mind - nasty pun intended
Here’s what engagement with movies used to look like:
The consumer sees a movie trailer a few months before the film’s release. In the weeks preceding the big release date, the consumer sees a few 30-second commercial spots on TV. Perhaps they catch a glimpse of the movie poster during a visit to the theater. Finally, the big night arrives, and it’s up to the producers to immerse the consumer in a 2-hour experience that will encourage them to speak positively about the film with their friends.
The quality of the movie is out of marketers’ hands, yes. But marketers have found a new way to ensure that consumers are spending more than 2 hours with their movie brands, thereby increasing the chances that they will share their engagement with others. Furthermore, marketers are transcending the concept of word-of-mouth, a crucial determinant in the movie-going process. In a 2006 Los Angeles Times poll on the moviegoing habits of teens and young adults, 38% of those surveyed said they share their opinions about a movie during or right after the film or on the same day. It is hardcore fans alone who hit up the message boards. So how can marketers gain and virally spread the interest of casual movie-goers, people who may have a slight interest in their films?
Mashups aren’t entirely new to the YouTube universe. People have been recreating trailers for a while now, posting “re-cut” versions on YouTube for pure entertainment purposes (sometimes, hilariously inappropriate entertainment purposes). Marketers found a way to turn these blatant copyright violations into promotional machines. The mashup has become an incredible marketing tool.
You want the proof?
In 3 days, I spent 10 hours creating mashup trailers from the Saw movie series. 10 hours of TRUE engagement. 10 hours of FREE engagement. And you better believe that I am creating buzz with my friends. Upon posting the mashup tool to my Facebook profile, I uncovered three more Saw fans, manifested in the form of public wall posts, status updates, and news-feed glory.
It’s a simple concept: incent me to chop up your movie by entering my work into a contest with a sweet prize. I am likely to spend hours perfecting my trailer, spread the word, and see your movie. Combined, DVR adoption and the internet have opened doors such that a 30-second commercial should serve as no more than a reminder. Make consumers feel your brand by finding ways they would like to interact.
It used to be a scary thing - giving control of your brand to your consumers. But isn’t marketing about giving the people what they want?
Marketing communications have shifted from a one-way street to a conversation with the customer. New media grants your customers easy access to channels that allow them to share their opinions about your brand with millions of other people. Until recently, marketers have allowed customers to bad-mouth their brands, accepting that they have no control over what is posted in the blogosphere. The game is rapidly changing, though, thanks to marketers who are willing to take risks.
“Outside the box” thinking? Most marketers believe they are thinking outside the box when they create a viral video or take user feedback into consideration for future campaigns. EA took this idea one step further: literally responding to a single customer (albeit, a very popular one) by creating a hilariously creative YouTube video response featuring the real Tiger Woods.
Some serious negative discussion was reversed into some hugely positive buzz (almost 2 million views, to be exact, and countless blog posts). Granted, this response came nearly a year after Levinator25’s video was first posted. It’s certainly a step in the right direction, though! Viral videos are pretty exciting (although the novelty is rapidly wearing thin and truly buzz-worthy concepts are becoming harder to capture), but a genuine video response to a YouTube posting, that talks directly to a vlogger and his viewers in their language? Now THAT is revolutionary!
In 2006 Conan O’Brien was on Charlie Rose and made a comment to the effect of being in “The Golden Age of TV”. I’ve heard several people in the last few years mention this Golden Age of Television – the idea that with high competition from a multitude of cable/satellite channels and saturation of the internet, networks are being forced to break out of the mold. It makes sense, right?
I watch a lot of television, and I think we are in yet another Golden Age of Television*. However, this might be the last Golden Age of Television on the actual television. And by that I mean the next wave of great episodic, small screen, short format, motion pictures (my new definition of TV Shows**) will be all digital and delivered in a variety of avenues, not just on your TV set.
The networks (finally) realize this, so they’re pushing out the best content in years to keep you tuned in, but I think this latest Golden Age of Television is helping accelerate the migration. The shows are so good and so discussed – both online and off – that normal viewers are changing their behavior to consume them. Now, admittedly, I’m not a normal viewer, but I do use several of the outlets that are becoming more commonplace. I have Tivo, ReplayTV, and Apple TV. I also “Slingbox” from a DirectTV/DVR and watch YouTube on my iPhone (or Wii ) when I’m bored. But most recent - and now my most popular choice - is watching shows directly from network websites.
This last outlet is the one I want to discuss in more detail, because I believe it’s the future, and possibly the only place networks will be able to run when TV as we know it goes away. Now, I mentioned watching shows online as being a recent thing, but it isn’t really for me or anyone else, I just mean that it’s finally a viable option. Basically, all the other things I mentioned, from Tivo to Apple TV, are crutches, hybrids, mere toys that are helping me along until the inter-web catches up. It’s close now with the quality of video players that are showing up on network sites and the increase in bandwidth to homes across the land. At this point we’re only lacking a way to easily put these sites up on our current TVs; my Apple TV*** and Wii get me close but not quite there (and that’s a whole article in itself).
So why are network (and other online) video players the future? It’s the ability to control content and display sophisticated advertising, as well as other benefits like tracking, ease-of-use, social networking, and instant gratification which the web provides. On-demand content through cable/satellite providers come close, but lack some of these aspects. And by the time they catch up, the game will have changed again.
Back to networks. Through my online video player, not only can I serve up specifc episodes instantly, I can incorporate ranking and recommendations from the community, promote other content properties that I own, and pull in complentary content (games, wikis,etc…) that reinforce the brand.
Example: I can watch Burn Notice on USA and sit through all the commercials (12 - 16 minutes worth), I could watch it on AppleTV for $1.99 through iTunes, or I could watch it on usanetwork.com (1 - 3 minutes of commercials, never more than 30 seconds per break). Even if I Tivo’d Burn Notice (which I do on occasion) assuming I remembered or had it scheduled, I still have to fast forward through 8 or so commercial breaks, which typically equates to more time fast forwarding than the 3 minutes online. When I do end up watching on USA’s site, I’m served up ads that I usually don’t mind watching because they’re more targeted. I also get links to a Burn Notice game, Burn Notice character profiles, and I get to see a funny clip for Monk (which I might start watching now).
I’ll touch more on this in the days to come; I’d really like to look at what networks are doing right and doing wrong in the way they broadcast their content on the web. For now, I would love any comments you have, especially video players and sites you’ve visited. If nothing else, go watch something: NBC, USA, TBS, ABC.
*All you TV historians will probably classify this as the “Third: Golden Age of Television”.
**Give me some slack, it’s a work in progress. I probably need to take out “small screen” once my new contacts make it irrelevant.
*** If I could bring myself to hack my Apple TV I think I would have the technology part of this equation solved, but I don’t want to risk it and it’s not easy for the average user.
Last week news broke that Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo to allow search engines to access content within Flash files or SWF file formats. In essence, Adobe released a code in the form of a SWF library that allowed these search engines to crawl and index text that’s embedded into the Flash file in almost any language (NOTE: bidirectional languages such as Hebrew and Arabic are currently not accessible).
I’m sure that Flash developers rejoiced at this news since text within Adobe Flash files has been invisible to search engines up until today’s advancement. But the question that comes to mind is whether this news is actually significant (since I’m blogging about it you would think that I feel that it is). In my mind, I can see three things that will come out of this change. These include:
Additional Competitive Pressure on Microsoft
In case you didn’t know, Microsoft and Adobe are at war over the Rich Internet Application development market. In April of 2007, Microsoft released Silverlight, a web browser plugin that allows developers to combine crisp animation and multimedia sound to create a rich experiences, to compete with Adobe Flash. Unfortunately for Microsoft, Flash is found on more than 98% of internet-enabled desktops, making Microsoft’s task of unseating Flash quite a feat. Now it is common knowledge that there’s little love between Microsoft and Yahoo or Google so in my opinion, Adobe is just using their search engine friendly Flash format to further drive a wedge between these companies and solidify their market share.
Search engines take many factors into account in determining the rankings of a website. Since content within Flash files could not be accessible by search engines, interactive marketers could easily sway clients, who begged for Flash-based sites, to use AJAX in the site construction since it provided a search engine friendly way of developing robust text animations. With the announcement by Adobe, there’s been an outcry by some of the best known SEO experts (specifically Bruce Clay) about a resurgence of websites built entirely of Flash because now the text is accessible. While I can see why Bruce may be worried (I thought of the same concern when I read the news), I think that he forgot the basic rule of search engine optimization: highly ranked sites are composed of multiple pages that have unique, non-repetitive content. So for those thinking that they can build a site entirely of Flash, they’ll quickly realize that their Flash site will be composed of a single page and that goes against the rule above. So while I can’t put it past some folks to develop Flash-based websites, the trend to avoid content-rich Flash develop will likely remain at or near current levels.
Ace in the Hole for Google and Yahoo
While the first two deal with short term benefits to the search engine giants, I also believe that Google and Yahoo are viewing the a bigger value (that may not be exploitable today) in being able to search Flash files. The one area that both companies share is in their video sharing sites (Yahoo! Video and Google’s YouTube). Neither companies are able to sufficiently capitalize on the strong growth of online videos since the content within these videos is not readable to search engines. While the current Flash indexing advancement does not allow for Flash videos (which are FLV format) to be accessible by search engines, one could imagine that after this trial run both Google and Yahoo will ask Adobe to make the indexing of FLV a reality. I would also imagine that Google and Yahoo will look to buy some sort of Voice-to-Text technology so that can read their video assets and leverage them in search advertising. If you’ve looked at my blog entries you’ll know that I’ve beaten recently on Google for the lack of new search advertising assets but with this advancement one can see that there’s new value in video.
I think it’s safe to say that we love Viral Marketing here at Engauge! Clearly, one of the best ways to get your viral videos the most exposure is to get some attention on YouTube. I was browsing last night and stumbled upon a video which totally blew my mind. Check it out for yourself:
Now you might wonder “how is this a viral marketing video?” Well, I’m not sure if it is or isn’t. But, the video itself made me very curious to find out how this “trick” was done. I started searching the Web for answers and ran across a couple different theories. Check out Snopes to learn more about similar videos.
The most logical theory is that something else is heating the popcorn underneath the table, as suggested at About:Urban Legands. They also suggested it could be a viral marketing campaign for some still unknown popcorn brand. If that’s the case, the marketing team behind this campaign is doing an excellent job of creating a YouTube hit.
People have been duplicating the video in several languages and many of them are getting tons of exposure. Hey, if they come out with popcorn that can be popped using cell phones then we could all eat on-the-go without microwaves. How great would that be?!
Urban Legand or Viral Marketing? Either way, it’s really cool! Maybe we should just test this popcorn trick out! Who’s hungry??!!
How do you make a purchase? If you’re anything like me, sometimes you have an idea of what you’re looking for, and other times you’re simply shopping with friends/family for the sheer joy of the experience. This pattern of buying isn’t really much different than it was 10 years ago - you buy what you need, and sometimes you indulge.
What IS different is how we make our final purchases today. The Internet plays a huge role. We’re highly informed consumers, researching our purchases heavily. We review forums, blogs and product reviews, and we comparison shop. Then, we refine our final purchase by locating the best place, on or offline, to make our purchase. More and more frequently, though, these final purchases are occurring online.
But something is still missing from the ecommerce experience.
ENTER SOCIAL COMMERCE
Engauge’s VP of Strategy, Raghu Kakarala, and Andrew Knight, the Director of Ecommerce at Astral Brands (the company behind Aloette cosmetics and Pür Minerals) recently spoke at an event on the topic of “Social Commerce.” I’d like to share some of the great information that came from this presentation, titled “Social Commerce: The Changing Face of Online Shopping.”
It began like this: the Internet has done an excellent job of allowing us to buy online. But in many cases, websites are missing the part that allows you the shop online. Important and powerful emotional motivators are absent - such as being around others while you shop, asking for advice from your friends, seeing your purchases as they are in the real world, and just plain having fun - the SOCIAL elements of shopping.
Engage with Your Audience
In the presentation, Raghu and Andrew each shared trends taking hold in ecommerce that are finally beginning to catering to the way consumers like to shop. Andrew shared how he was able to tap into the power of niche blogs to promote new products from Aloette cosmetics. He went where his audience was - popular cosmetics and beauty blogs with passionate people behind them. He shared Aloette products with them and hoped they would review them. And they did.
Andrew also discussed the tremendous strides reviews have made - such as with NewEgg.com. This little known website has a large an loyal following - raking in $1.9 Billion in online sales in 2007! Not only are they’re sales strong, their service is impecible - 20,000 service reviews equate to a lifetime review score of 9.8! NewEgg capitalized on this popularity by launching a community - Eggxpert (cute right?) that already has 60,000 users and 300,000 posts.
In addition, several brands are now offering Q&A, which allows them to actively respond to customer questions about products. Such as Answers Depot from The Home Depot Canada.
What Does the Future of Social Commerce Look Like?
Raghu discussed powerful new trends taking hold in some industries, which could - and possibly should - represent the future of online shopping. The fashion industry, for example, is an early adopter of many of these trends. Raghu shared several websites that showcase exactly what social commerce is all about.
ShopStyle represents a trend that many brands would be wise to consider. They developed a community that allows people to create “looks” based on their interests or the look of a celebrity. Then, people who like their looks can “follow” them. It’s not unusual for a ShopStyle user to have HUNDREDS of looks and an equal amount of followers.
Simply mouseover an accessory on a user’s “look” and you’ll get a snapshot view of where the product is for sale. Click on it and you’ll be taken there.
Raghu also shared a nifty application called Clavardon that allows for collaborative shopping. Simply, you go to their website, key in the URL of the website where you wish to shop, invite your friends, and you’re there - with a chat window above the webpage that allows you to collaborate on the shopping excursion with the friend or friends of your choice.
GRAVY
Just for gravy, I also wanted to share a website that Raghu covered that highlights the many aspects of Social Commerce. It’s not all about the interaction with others, it’s also about trying to mimic a real-life shopping experience. How many times have you looked online for an article of clothing only to find it, lifeless on the page? Then end up leaving and thinking “I have no idea how that would look on me!”?
Without too much complication, Martin + Osa have managed to give you an idea. If you “Shop by Outfit” models actually WEARING the article of clothing turn into video, moving and turning, to give you an idea of how the outfit will sit on the body, how the fabrics lay together, etc.
(Click the image to see what it looks like in motion)
Now, if they could only find models who don’t look so hungry, we’d really be onto something!
As many Engaugers are aware, here in the Behavioral Research Department we have been up to our ears in research work lately. Early mornings, late evenings, lots of coffee, approaching deadlines, and no end of billable hours in sight. All this Discovery has sort of forced our Behavioral Research Manager, Josh, to have to crack the whip to the BR ladies. In fact, the amount of research to be done had reached the point where the team had even discussed working over the holiday weekend (working on Monday?!?!).
Not surprisingly, this idea was met with despair and objection as we all watched our fantasies of beaches, road trips, and barbecues vanish. So today, when Josh announced to the BR Team that we had successfully completed all of the tasks, projects and assignments in time for our client deadlines, the Behavioral Research team let our hair down. Josh told us that we could have our extra day over the weekend, and instructed us not to even think about online behavioral research over the holiday. We have always appreciated and celebrated Josh’s methods for project allocation and his mad skills for facilitating task completion by deadlines, but today we girls got to celebrate a three-day weekend. Okay, so we did more than celebrate … it turns out that behavioral researchers know how to get down (Sayonara Josh!).
To check us out as we celebrate, click on the image below:
I have been thinking a lot about viral video … What makes a video go viral? Great content!
What makes great content? Who knows? That is like saying “what will people find interesting, funny, relevant, etc.”
Some colleagues recently shared a viral video with me that underscores that it does not take expensive production costs to create something that people will find interesting and pass along to friends.
After watching this video just once, you will be humming the song and singing the tagline “It’s just like a mini-mall!” The brilliance in this video (with over 2.5 million views on YouTube and counting) is that is it simple, catchy, original, and fun. The Flea Market Montgomery owner, Sammy Stephens has become a minor celebrity with appearances on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Family Force 5’s webisode series The Really Real Show.
Why did this video become viral? It is just plain FUN!
I was checking out Geek Sugar last night and came across an interesting video posting about the iPhone. The point of the post was that the iPhone interface is so simple that anyone can easily figure out how to use it — even a two year old toddler.
In searching YouTube, I came across quite a few videos (see a couple below). The interesting part is that there are no videos of any baby boomers using it. Hmm … I guess that it’s not that interesting to see a 44-year-old using their iPhone. Heheh.
At Spunlogic, we have a lot of great experience and unique ideas to share. From work with clients to new approaches and trends, in this award winning blog you'll find Spunlogic experts sharing their opinions and ideas on all aspects of interactive marketing.
