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I knew something was up when that low budget, semi-confusing commercial for Octagon Global Recruiting ran during the last 15 minutes of the season finale of LOST. I’m a big fan and to me everything about it screamed Dharma Initiative. Apparently I wasn’t the only one, seeing as how the site was so bogged down it took me a solid 10 minutes to get there.
Sad thing is, once you hit the site the jig is somewhat up. No more mystery after that. Clearly ABC is shooting for some sort of viral initiative here, and it will be interesting to see how it pans out.
Oh well, just like LOST, we’ll have to wait and see what happens.
::cue dramatic cut to black::
The new buzz marketing campaign for The Dark Knight is either ridiculous, awesome, or ridiculously awesome. As intense/elaborate as the plan gets, it’s still contingent on one key thing: People’s willingness to tell other people.
In case you didn’t read the article above, here’s the scoop: An online game was released and the winners were eventually given the address of a real life deli where they were told to give the name “Robin Banks”. The first person to give that name at the deli was handed a cake. Inside the cake was a box with a cell phone, charger and number to call. When the person called, they were told to keep the phone on and charged at all times, and that a call would be coming soon…
Now I think this is great. This is marketing to the 10th power. It breaks so many rules because it allows people to go above and beyond, and it really sucks them in. Of course it’s prohibitively expensive to do this on a broad scale, but thats the beauty of buzz, you don’t have to.
But as cool as this is, it would have fallen flat if the person who got the cake hadn’t told their story to the world. This whole venture could have backfired if the person who got the cake, and never plugged the cell phone in. It could even have backfired if they followed all the steps, but didn’t tell anyone besides people they know.
Thats the buzz marketing linchpin.
You have to create something cool/noteworthy enough that people want to talk about it. Something that fosters conversation, discussion, and speculation.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the need/quest for discovering a new way to measure social media and interaction and have come to one conclusion: No one has come to any conclusions. No one is sure what to measure, or how to measure it.
But they seem determined on trying, which is puzzling to me. It’s puzzling because there is this unyielding need for some direct form of measurement. I guess the internet has spoiled us. Online, you can nail down page views, click throughs, and conversion rates for one version of a particular ad, all things that are almost impossible in other media. How can you determine the ROI on a TV commercial? How can you measure the exact views or conversion rates on a full-page newspaper ad? You really can’t, but companies spend billions every year on them just the same.
Traditional media is just not as measurable as the internet. However, social media is not as measurable as the rest of the web, which (in my opinion) is why so many are gun shy about really using it.
They don’t really understand it, and they can’t really measure it. A scary proposition for most.
Social media should be viewed and measured in a unique way. It’s not as hardcore data-oriented as adwords, but it’s also not as ambiguous as TV. We need to understand that social media is a two way street and what matters is not how many people are going down it, but how engaged and interested they are.
Managing a viral campaign is a both an art and a science. To increase your success rate with viral marketing, make sure your campaign has all the following elements:
Timing - Often the most overlooked of all viral elements. Timing can make or break a campaign. You have to make sure that your idea is novel and that it’s different than other things (viral or not) happening at that time. Similar ideas or executions can lessen your impact and slow your spread rate, reducing your chances at success.
Incentive - This is why people will invest their time/attention/money in your idea. With all the clutter out there, campaigns and ideas that don’t offer any perks will be swept aside or ignored completely. The benefit itself can vary greatly, it can range from a discount to the fact that people look cool or “in the know” for discovering and sharing it with their friends.
Mystery - This generates the excitement. Unraveling your plan slowly keeps people interested, and it keeps them coming back as well. The key here is to give them just enough information to get them hooked, and then slowly release more as time goes on. The tricky part can be finding the balance between mystery and obscurity.
Ease - If it’s not easy to spread your idea, then it won’t be viral. It’s that simple. You need to do everything in your power to make it easy, or sometimes even necessary, for your idea to be passed along. Put in links for E-mailing, Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Facebook, and anything else you think might facilitate sharing. Make it easy to talk about and explain.
NBC has begun running the following commercial for it’s new show Chuck. The commercial, which intentionally appears subliminal, runs about 30 seconds. See what you can pick up.
It’s a great shot at viral marketing. My guess is that they intended for people to TiVo or DVR this commercial, slow it down, and watch it again and again to try and figure it out. When a company gets you to voluntarily watch their ads, I’d say thats a success.
Here’s the video slowed down so you can read the captions.
You can go to www.chuckssecret.com and watch the same video, but this is where NBC falls short of a true viral campaign. Underneath the video is a link to the NBC fall preview page that gives you an entire two minute trailer for the show and explains everything. The right amount of mystery is what makes a viral campaign really work, and by giving it away already, NBC takes a lot of the momentum away.
If I were running this campaign I would have started three months ago with just a ten seconds of a blank frame except for the words “Chucks Secret”. I would run that for a month and stir up some interest and then add www. and .com to it, so it would read “www.chuckssecret.com” where the video would be playing. Then I would open up and start playing the thirty second spot on TV and then a month or before it airs, I would run the whole trailer.
NBC shows a good effort towards some new marketing ideas, but gets a little trigger happy with the exposure, canceling a lot of the viral effects.
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