How to fail in online marketing
June 28th, 2008 by Jim AmosSimple really. Here’s how to fail in just a few easy steps:
- You want to spread awareness of your brand/product among tech savvy young persons on the internets. SO, of course your campaign must be centered around Youtube. Naturally.
- Decide to throw little to no online advertising or any traditional media in the general direction of your awsome idea, because no doubt the whole thing will be totally VIRAL, and won’t require any money be spent on actually promoting it.
- Set up your youtube channel, along with some totally cheesey/lame/fake looking ‘example’ of what you want users to post – as well as the default TV ad to kick things off.
- Include a link to the insanely obtuse, boring, depressingly restrictive instructions, such as “Running Time: 5 minutes maximum, including any credits. If entry is longer than 5 minutes, entry may be disqualified”. Knowing full well, of course, that nobody in their right mind would actually read through all of the instructions – Heaven forbid that you would offer a more palatable version of the rules first, to entice people to enter without boring them stupid.
- Totally forget to post videos sent in by users back to the channel, thus embracing the whole point of social media and the idea of video sharing/communication – or do you really still have zero entries even though the contest is already a month old?
- Assume that anyone will actually take time out of their busy, busy lives to record these little DIY commercials in order to win ‘$15,000 big ones. Cash’ when in reality there is an already established benign movement of people posting this exact stuff for free already, regardless of the fat stack you’re offering.
- But you don’t care about the content – this is all about increasing awareness and appreciation of the spikly spanky shiny new product, right? Which is…um, I forget?
I’m sorry Honda. I like you, generally, but in this particular instance, you fail.
This kind of thing should serve as yet another message to agencies to beware of slapping social media into their campaigns without putting a layer of ’science’ beneath the ‘creation’ of advertising that otherwise relies on some kind of magical WOM and a lot of bored teenagers in order to be successful.
Connecting to your potential customers through Youtube: brilliant idea. Not thinking like your audience or trying to give them something truly compelling or fun to bite into: disappointing.
Tags: advertising, brand, marketing, Online advertising, video, viral, youtube
June 30th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Hey Jim, good list of guidelines. I’d like read a follow up post to this one with some ideas and tactics to make the same campaign work. Like a campaign makeover.
June 30th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
James: good suggestion, I might just do that. Thanks.
July 9th, 2008 at 5:23 am
Sprint had an equally disastrous (not quite as bad, but bad) attempt with YouTube recently. On June 30th, they launched a campaign paying the first 1,000 people $20 to insert a Samsung Insight into their home videos. The contest is even called SELLOUT! Yeah, that’ll entice folks.
Worse, the contest is hosted on a microsite with an URL that will be easily misspelled or forgotten: instinctthephone.com. Bonus: A slow loading Flash intro with ominous clouds that have nothing to do with a product launch.
To me, the lamest part of the contest is that you don’t even have to buy the phone. Upload the video from their site (via a popup window with YouTube) and they have video elements of a hand holding the phone that will be superimposed over your movie.
Nice. I guess helping clients sell product isn’t required anymore.
Don’t these marketing idiots realize that paying people will actually kill the motivation to make user-generated content? [ Beats head into wall ]
July 10th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
Yeah that is lame too. I was totally not impressed by the incessant voice-over’s either. At first I thought it might be an interesting accessibility option, but no – it’s clearly there just to make you search for the mute button. Again, one of the worst things about the contest is the strict rules, like ‘Movie cannot be less than 30 secs or exceed 2 mins, no more than 4 people on-screen, no references to tv-shows etc. It comes off like they’re actually looking for a polished 2 minute broadcast spot on the cheap. I thought the idea was to engage your customer-base in interesting ways, not just use them as creative labor.
July 10th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Also, I have to mention this because it’s funny. Go back to the honda youtube site > click on ’submit’ then instead of ‘upload’ go straight to ‘continue’ > from there you can submit ANY movie on youtube regardless of who posted it or what subject it is, then when you’re done it says ‘thanks for entering’. Except that, erm, you didn’t leave any identification or contact details. This is the problem with expecting a contest to manage itself, relying on technology alone to make it work. A contest like this doesn’t stand a chance without real human moderation/interaction etc.
July 10th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
And this, surely, is the final word on how lame and unoriginal the idea of a no-strategy video contest can be: The video contest clearinghouse