The spark that ignites a million conversations
Youtube Marketing Advertising
There’s an idea catching on around the globe among the more savvy clients. They have discovered they can get their brand message out to the world without having to spend tens of millions of dollars on broadcast media.
And it’s all down to that delightful service called Youtube (and other similar video sharing services that permeate cyberspace).
Youtube is possibly the most powerful media in the world right now. Not just because it is actively watched by hundreds of millions of people a day, but also because it is free. It symbolizes the democratization of media. Which is why it is hated by media moguls like Rupert Murdoch and loved by the masses.
Cadbury Gorilla was probably the first ad to really show us the potential of this medium for commercial messages (Check out the spot here.)
It’s an amazing case study and worth analyzing.
In 2006, Cadbury had to withdraw a million bars of chocolate because of a salmonella scare. Their sales quickly dropped by 25% and stayed there. The brand was in trouble.
The Gorilla spot revived their fortunes.
They spent an awful lot of money on TV to promote the campaign. But where it found traction was on the Internet. Within weeks it became the talk of the country and was viewed by more than 6 million people on Youtube.
People may have first seen it on TV, but the conversations about its brilliance took place online. It swept through cybersapce like wildfire.
The spot dumbfounded many marketers at Cadbury. They simply couldn’t understand how such an ad could work. For one thing, it didn’t show chocolate. As one veteran Cadbury hand put it, “They get it right when the ads make you drool. Without chocolate, Cadbury ads lose their sensual appeal and along with that go sales.”
How wrong he was. Cadbury’s sales quickly shot up – and by the end of 2007 they enjoyed double digit growth. An incredible reversal from the year before.
At a Cadbury conference, the CEO of the company famously said, “2007 may be have been the Year of the Pig in the Chinese Calendar, but as far as we’re concerned it was the year of the Gorilla.”
Perhaps an even more dramatic example of how a commercial message can infect the Internet is the T-Mobile campaign. (Check out the case study here.)
The 3 minute ad aired just once on TV (just before Celebrity Big Brother, a popular UK show).
The response was enormous. 1 million people viewed it on Youtube within the first couple of days. That number has since swelled to more than 15 million views.
The campaign was a collaboration between Saatchi & Saatchi and Freud Communications (a very good PR company in the UK). And it wasn’t as impromptu as it seemed on the surface.
The viral nature of the spot was entirely engineered. The 300 people who took part in the dance were hired by the agency and carefully choreographed. In addition, a ‘hide’ was created for journalists, a secret room where the media could watch, report and film from. It was one of the key reasons the stunt got so much press so quickly. Not just in traditional media but on blogs too (more than 90,000 covered the story).
TV played a crucial part in this campaign. But as I mentioned earlier, it wasn’t used in a conventional manner. Instead of running the commercial over a 3 month period with cut downs of 30, 20 and 10 second spots, it was aired just once. There was a philosophy behind this thinking. Why spend millions of dollars on broadcast when you can air it once and let the Internet do the rest for you? In other words, the TV spot becomes “the spark that ignites a million conversations”.
It’s a strategy that certainly saves you a lot of money (it doesn’t take a rocket science to work out the price difference between 1 spot and 300).
But it only works if the creative is sticky enough. You can’t take a typical Unilever ad for shampoo and expect it to go viral. For a spot to infect the Internet, it has to include some or all of the following principles:
1. Is it irreverent? It’s got to challenge convention and be as controversial as you can be without breaking the law.
2. Is it original? Formulaic ad formats won’t inspire people. Your idea has to be something never seen before. Think about campaigns like Whopper Freakout, Whopper Sacrifice and Bravia Balls.
3. Is it human? The T-Mobile Dance tapped into our collective sense of community. Music and dance are as primal as it gets. And Cadbury anthropomorphized a Gorilla. If they had just shown a monkey doing monkey things, it wouldn’t have resonated with people.
4. Is it real? We are living in a world of reality TV. People love to be voyeurs of real life.
5. Is it funny? People like to laugh. And they like to share laughter with others.
6. Does it have celebrity? Don’t underestimate the power of celebrities in your ideas, especially if you can combine this principle with some of those above. The most viewed Youtube video at the moment is of Lady Gaga with over 200 million views.
IMPLICATIONS
What does this mean for us in the communications industry? Simply this. The old model is dying. Gone are the days when you would look at the media plan and populate it with conventional advertising formats (30 second TV spots, full page press ads and 12 sheet posters). Today, the smart folk create the idea first and then work out how to make it permeate society. And the solution these days isn’t a multi-million dollar media budget. Ten thousand dollars is quite often enough.
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