Advertising for free: the Top Ten Virtual Videos

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday September 2, 2011.

In the advertising business the two most frequent sentences you hear are: “I need a big advertising campaign” followed by, “But we don’t have much money to spend”.

You try to explain that any advertising costs lots of money, but then the client wonders what’s your worth if you can’t fix a little matter like that.

Which is why I’m fascinated by viral advertising. After all if you hit the right buttons, you can win millions of viewers. They do much more than notice your commercial on TV - they have had it recommended, selected the web site, found the ad and then elected to watch it - usually a couple of minutes long.

A Boston company called Visible Data specialises in measuring and recording the top choices in video sites like Youtube and puts out regular hit parades. Now they have published the Top Ten Viral Videos of All Time, together with US trade publication Advertising Age.

So far there are only two ads which have achieved over 100,000,000 views. You have probably been sent the links by your friends already.

Blendtec makes a high powered kitchen blender which its inventor, Tom Dickson, demonstrates by blending - unusual things. These productions, cheaply filmed, are called Will It Blend and the objects have included mobile phones, Nike sneakers, broomsticks, SLR cameras - so far 107 videos with the latest featuring a Justin Bieber doll and CD.

Do they work? To date they have been viewed 170 million times and Dickson claimed: “Will it Blend has had an amazing impact to our commercial and our retail products.”

Another one you’ll have seen is the break-dancing babies spot by Evian Water. This was an expensive technical production with its mixture of live babies and digital animation, but the company has received 158 million free peeks.

I’ve already written about Old Spice and their handsome hunk who tells the ladies that while their partner may never look like him, he can smell like him. Now into its third campaign, the ads have generated over 180 million views, not counting the free air time they received on news shows. All three campaigns made the top 10.

Other top views are VW Passat’s The Force at 60,000,000; DC Shoes with nine minutes of manic driving by Ken Block, watched by 60 million petrolheads.

The incredible motion-sensing powers of the Xbox 360 have fascinated 54 million viewers, while a Doritos commercial set in a church funeral was actually made by the Mosaic Church of Los Angeles and scored 47 million.

You can also spend a squillion on your commercial, like the 2004 Pepsi Gladiators - We Will Rock You which starred Britney Spears, Pink, and Beyonce Knowles as the warrior amazons and Enrique Iglesias as the Roman emperor.

That would have had the budget of a small movie, complete with a Colosseum stage set and very skimpy armour for the girls. Seven years later it’s still on the web, having clocked up 53 million hits.

The point is that it’s not the amount of money you spend on the commercial - it’s the cleverness of the idea behind it. What these winners have is wit, originality and charm. So a tabletop with the client using his food processor can be more watchable than a team of magastars on a million-dollar set.

Australians haven’t been left behind in all this. While we currently don’t have the huge successes generated by CUB’s Big Ad five years ago, there is still some local content.

An “investigation” made by two guys and a cameraman, showed how easy it is to get into Sydney clubs, for free, if you look like a DJ. It’s three minutes long and the sponsor Sprite only gets a look-in at the opening and closing titles. But it did clock up a million.

ray@ebeatty.com

Make sure your brand is well backed up

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday August 26, 2011
We all know brand advocates. Apple has built a billion-dollar industry out of them, those annoying friends who can’t hold back from showing you their latest iPhone app or iPad game that they are convinced are life-sustaining possessions - they’d be dead without them.

Another company built on fanatics is Harley-Davidson. Here I’m not talking about the Hell’s Angels but the city stockbrokers and suburban businessmen who relive their Marlon Brando fantasies, leather jacket and all (even though they now look like the Brando in his later years).

It’s not just boys and toys either. I remember some years ago when the passion for Clinique non-allergenic cosmetics swept the consciousness of our well-heeled eleganzia. I would blink at the prices of my wife’s purchases: “They charge this much because there’s nothing in them?”

The brand advocate can do much of your marketing job for you, at a fraction of the cost of advertising campaigns.

There’s still word of mouth in the coffee room or supermarket aisle, but these days the reach is so much wider. There’s word of twitter and word of Facebook, endless mobile phone conversations, so now there’s no reason why the advocate ever needs to stop talking.

But they have to be given ammunition. This is where you come in. They want to be in the know, to be that step ahead, so they can lord it over their followers.

Clubs and support groups are so much easier these days with web sites and Facebook pages. Those who are true believers will lap up any information you can provide. So the smart marketers will leak just enough information to incite curiosity and excitement.

Once more, look upon the master’s example: Steve Jobs can squeeze out information on his new product drop by drop till his masses are salivating and queuing up at the Apple store.

You probably have less resources than Jobs, but a lot can be achieved through sampling. Give your product to the key advocates and let them try it out and spread the word.

Ah but where do you find these devotees? Well start by following the social sites, put out questionnaires periodically, rummage through the guarantee cards.

Give someone the task of maintaining a positive engagement with these fans. Newsletters, tweets, Facebook entries, shopping centre presentations - they are all time-consuming.

Make the process a two-way street. Listen to their whinges and complaints, and let them know you’re listening. Silence is the greatest killer of relationships.

Software companies are notorious for this. They put out a new release and leave it there for six months or more as the bugs and complaints emerge, unanswered. Then they will release version X.1 with many of the problems fixed - but meanwhile the users have turned elsewhere.

How much easier to say, “We know about your problems in these areas and are working on them, they will be fixed in our new service pack release”.

Which brings up the point: stop selling, rather converse and engage.

Too many companies treat their web sites and Facebook pages like electronic brochures. They should be more involving and allow the customer to feel that there is someone out there listening. Apart from anything else this can be very cheap and efficient market research.

With new products, while it’s important to keep up the excitement and expectations, in the long run you should aim to under promise and over deliver. Cause the other way round can be disastrous.

If your advocate receives their sample and then discovers something more than they expected, you can be sure it will be quickly communicated all down the line.

So treasure your brand advocates, inform and reward them. The returns will be far greater than the cost, they can even be the difference between success and failure for a brand.

ray@ebeatty.com;