Archive for the 'Viral' Category

Just when you thought consumer generated content (CCG) was dead, and had just been a fad that peaked with the crappy offerings by the likes of Doritos and Chevrolet (man, that one sucked) in the 2007 Super bowl, rebel-rousing grassroots organization MoveOn.org goes and launches a call for entries for a CCG for Prseidentail hopeful, Barack Obama.

Now, remember it was MoveOn.org who launched a CCG contest around the 2004 elections called “Bush in 30 Seconds.” The goal was to explain key points about W and his policies in, you’ve guessed it, 30 seconds. The overall winner, called “Child’s Play,” was created by adman Charlie Fisher from Denver and featured young kids working crappy jobs - at the grocery store checkout, changing tires, cleaning offices, working in public relations (alright, that one didn’t make the cut) - with endline “Guess who’s going to pay off President Bush’s $1 trillion deficit?” Nice. It was a great idea well produced. An entry that compared Bush to Nazi Germany had been rejected after it received complaints (from Nazi Germany).

This time around MoveOn.org are calling for entries that put the subject of the 30 second film - Mr. Obama - in a positive light in an attempt to “help him across the finish line” and win the Democratic party nomination. The panel of judges include such liberal luminaries as Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jesse Jackson and Oliver Stone and the winning ad will air nationally.

All of this leads me to wonder…
Will Barack himself have to “approve of this message”?
Will MoveOn’s move lead to a resurgence of interest in CCG campaigns?
Will the winning ad in fact be created by an adman, demonstrating once again that it’s not really consumer-generated at all, but Moonlighting Adman Created content (MACC)?
Will Hillary and McCain respond with some MACC of their own?
Will residents of Florida and Michigan be eligible to compete?

I don’t spend a lot of time in the cinema itself, it’s all payperview and downloaded crap these days, but I was with my parents and it was a choice between Atonement and… Wait! What about “Juno”? I happen to be a huge Michael Cera freak (www.clarkandmichael.com is mad hilarity) and so we went. Turns out the film’s fabulous - and finally a director, young Reitman, whose deft skill at creating coming AND serious turns, makes me sit up and go “I’ll tell everyone.”

However, there is a main character, Orange Tic Tacs, that actually threw me for a loop. Not since “My Big Fat Greek TV Movie” and the Michael Considine obsession with Windex, has a major American product placement (non-paid, I am told) been featured so “cool-y” in a major motion picture. And yet Ferrero USA, makers of the Tic Tac thang, have not done a thing to capitalize on Paul’s (Cera’s) nonstop fascination with the little orange one calorie treats (they actually use those words in the flick!).

I remember a billion years ago (94) when Quiz Show came out and Geritol was featured as a sponsor and it took six months and a few Oscar nods before that brand did anything to make hay with the news. And back then, social networking did not exist- not to mention the fact that Geritol was a sponsor of a SCANDALIZED show within the movie, so in fact it wasn’t too positive.

But heck, Ferrero, most known for Nutela and other badly-named old brands, has an opportunity to go for broke here with the one movie everyone is talking about that doesn’t star Johnny Depp.
They have their arms folded, I can tell, and it’s probably because “Juno” is about a 16-year-old pregnant kid — a brilliant and mature one, mind you — and they don’t want to get caught up in a debate about whether the candies support unwed young Mommies.

This is where the Punk mentality about making noise comes in handy. I can only hope that the Tic Tac makers out there somehow, somewhere, get their shit together and create a Tic Tac Orange subsite for people to share what’s orange about their lives — and even maybe create a little old chat room for lovers of this fine new American-made talk of the town. I want to see a Tic Tac character that, like that dancing baby of yore, appears in the oddest places throughout our Wide Web world.

If not, they are going to have orange mud all over their face. And in the DVD, you can best be sure a clever mini-doc on how Reitman and screenwriter Diago Cody (whatta name) “chose the Orange Tic Tac” …will be a wasted opportunity because by then we’ll have moved onto the next gimmick in our fast and fickle lives.

A study released by The Keller Fay Group, a New Brunswick, NJ, consultancy that features in Brandweek reveals that teens talk about brands twice as much as older folk do: 145 times a week on average according to the study. Like, er, wow!

The brands they mention are, not surprisingly, the ones they consume like iPod and Wii. Mostly, we imagine, when it comes to the iPod, conversations about how goddam irritating it is that whenever you log onto iTunes to update your iPod, you get innundated for days afterwards with spam about the latest new toons.

In fact, to support the assertion that a lot of what these young ‘uns are taking about is not all rosy, the study revealed that only 58% of the conversations about brands are positive, compared to 64% with adults. Hmm. So we guess not all brand chatter is good chatter.

We made a series of online videos a couple of months ago featuring two lovely ladies (Cleo and Anna) talking about Punk Marleting while removing their clothes. It appealed to our sense of humor and we thought it would be a fun way to deliver some marketing wisdom. We didn’t now if it would work or not, but the idea was in line with the tongue-in-cheek tone of the book, so thought it was worth a shot.

Well, the first video featuring Anna has just passed 150,000 views on YouTube, which is pretty amazing. Many of the viewers are probably adolscent boys, but even if 2% of them are potential business book buyers that is pretty respectable for an outlay of just a few hundred dollars. And number of views is still rising daily.

How many marketers put a short film on YouTube every day in the hope that it’ll become the next viral phenomenon only to see it fall flat on its face? OK, so we don’t know the answer, but we bet it’s A LOT. We love that marketers are willing to take risks and try new platforms, but the fact that so few of them succeed means that most of them still don’t get it. The media is NOT the message. Just because YouTube is hot does it mean people care about a marketing message that is stuffed on it. The content has to be great and relevant to the adolscent boys who are watching.

A recent campaign for Diesel underwear got oodles of attention by creating a big audacious idea and seeing where it went. It seemed to have worked, with millions visiting the Diesel website, a lot of PR buzz and likely accolades at the Cannes ad festival.