hose whose lives are turned completely upside down by revolution so rarely see it coming:hose whose lives are turned completely upside down by revolution so rarely see it coming:
• On July 14, 1789, a mob stormed the Bastille in Paris, marking the beginning of the end of aristocratic rule in France. Just 18 kilometres away, as la corneille flies, at the palace of Versailles, King Louis XVI recorded in his diary: “14 juillet: rien.” Nothing.
• Barely two years later, the French plantation masters of Saint-Domingue failed to anticipate the slave rebellion that would lead to the formation of the independent Republic of Haiti.
• Years earlier, England’s King George III may have been too busy slipping in and out of his controversial “madness” to anticipate trouble in the American colonies. (At one point, HRH insisted that every sentence he uttered must conclude with the word “peacock.”)
Reports of George III’s red urine suggest His Majesty suffered from porphyria, a rare blood disease. A recent theory connects his condition to his exposure to arsenic: his wigs were discovered to have contained three hundred times the minimum toxic level.
Given these precedents, the best and brightest of the marketing world might be forgiven for having slipped into their pyjamas on Saturday, April 23, 2005, sipping on their warm milk (with a dash of nutmeg), and scribbling “rien” in their diaries. That day, few took notice of the first video placed on a new website called YouTube. It was utterly, well, whelming: a nineteen-second video called Me at the Zoo, featuring YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim. (You can still find that clip on YouTube. It was uploaded at 8:27 p.m. on the fateful Saturday evening.) With elephants in the background, Karim explains that they have “really, really, really long trunks,” adding “and that’s cool.” No saucy nuance. No discernible double meaning. Watching that clip, it was clear that YouTube began its existence as a misnomer. There was no “you.” Or any other audience, for that matter.
Karim had co-founded the site with partners Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. All three were financially flush from their previous jobs, helping launch PayPal, and now their idea was to fill an online void: the lack of a one-stop Internet site that accepted and shared short video clips. Their timing, of course, was impeccable, as digital cameras and cameraphones were coming of age, allowing anyone to create videos and effects not possible outside a professional studio just a few years before. With the advent of YouTube, “civilians” began scooping TV news cameras with videos of world events. Cameraphones would record the most chilling images of the tsunami of December 26, 2004. At the same time, high-speed Internet was making it possible to exchange clips promptly.
So what happened when Jawed Karim unleashed the account of his pachyderm pilgrimage on a video-hungry world? In short, rien. Online viewers stayed away in droves. Hurley, Chen, and Karim circulated emails to friends, pleading them to upload videos. Calls to Wired magazine weren’t returned. A classified ad on Craigslist offered $100 through PayPal to attractive young ladies who uploaded ten videos of themselves. There were no takers.
The three partners tried a little of everything, short of tap dancing, to pump adrenalin into their site. They added a “related videos” feature—suggested videos one might want to see, relating to the one they were currently watching. They provided links to social networks, including Facebook and MySpace. They offered the ingenious “external video player”—allowing web hosts and bloggers to play any “YouTube” video from their own site. Then, finally, a miracle arrived in the form of Mentos mints and Diet Coke. Videos appeared showing the two elements combined, causing a high-powered, sticky geyser, similar to the vinegar-and-baking-soda experiment that mischievous Grade 5 teachers urge their students to try at home. It drew a jaw-dropping number of viewer hits. By 2008 the top three Mentos-Diet Coke videos had drawn more than eleven million hits.
Theories abound as to why these particular videos became so popular. I have my own, and it has to do with a great characteristic of the Internet: the fact that it levels the playing field. Everyone has access, and theoretically, everyone can be heard. The Mentos-Diet Coke experiment was an extension of that: everyone could try it. You didn’t need expensive equipment or materials, you just needed a couple of Mentos and a bottle of Diet Coke. Even David Letterman tried to beat the record for geyser height.
YouTube had become a destination.
It was impossible not to feel the shift in power. Broadcasters and publishers felt their grip slipping from public dialogue as audiences began creating, shaping, and controlling popular conversation. It was just as inevitable that the online community would eventually commandeer copyright materials, including music clips and videos and excerpts from TV shows and films. The question was: What would the copyright holders do about it?
The first salvo lobbed was a rap-spoof created for NBC’s Saturday Night Live called Lazy Sunday. Soon after the original broadcast on December 17, 2005, it was uploaded onto YouTube and drew five million hits. The promotions people at NBC were ecstatic, but the corporation’s lawyers weren’t. Citing copyright infringement, the network ordered the clip removed. In February 2006, YouTube obliged. But the medium—or, more precisely, the community that powered it—was not to be stopped any more than Wile E. Coyote can stop a stampede of cattle with his tiny circus umbrella. The same audience that could make and break TV shows, films, and music now ruled YouTube. That’s when the producers of popular film, TV, and music also had a change of heart: they stopped using YouTube audiences and started obeying them.
Users posted, edited, and parodied favourite clips at will while the copyright holders quietly applauded, or bit their lips, or both. The moguls of traditional media were no longer the gatekeepers they once were. After centuries of playing audience to mass media, people now had a megaphone all their own. Non-copyright YouTube clips began outdrawing the mightiest music videos and TV clips. The off-the-charts popularity of such videos as The Evolution of Dance, featuring “motivational speaker/comedian” Judson Laipply demonstrated that this new video portal would operate in ripples and waves generated by users themselves. For no earthly reason, a seemingly innocuous home video of two young children, titled Charlie Bit Me (the title doubles as a spoiler), quickly accrued a viewer hit-count in the tens of millions—and countless dozens of “response” videos: remakes, remixes, parodies, sequels, and all manner of variations-on-a- theme. The term viral video wove itself into the popular lexicon.
According to Bob Garfield, writing in Wired, thirty-five million viewers watched The Evolution of Dance on YouTube in just six months, a viewership few marketers dare to dream of.
In the mid-1990s, author Douglass Rushkoff had popularized the use of the word viral in the context of media and messaging in his book Media Virus. Think of it as “word of mouse” in the Internet age, where messages can spread worldwide almost instantly.
A year and a half after the day Jawed Karim posted Me at the Zoo, YouTube was streaming a hundred million videos daily, with seventy thousand new videos uploaded each day, and thirty million visitors each month. And each visitor spent an average of a half hour surfing YouTube. There were no programmers; no publishers; and no editors to plan, shape, or suppress messages. The audience was firmly in charge of what was, and what wasn’t, popular. Advertisers circled like gulls at low tide. Google had seen enough. On October 9, 2006, it bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. Karim, Hurley, and Chen’s invention was only eighteen months old.
To marketers, the YouTube audience was irresistible, but inaccessible, unless they could find ways to draw audiences to their messages. One of the early commercials to cause a sensation on the new medium was the famous Honda Accord “Cog” spot. It was a riveting Rube Goldberg-type feat of interactions that, legend has it, took over six hundred tries to get right. The final take was attempt number 605. But in the end, the spot attracted over a million viewers almost immediately, mostly due to the technical virtuosity it displayed. Today, there are YouTube brand channels, where advertisers can create their own YouTube sites inside YouTube, with proprietary content, ads, promotions, and games, together on a page, custom-designed to fit the character of the brand. Even the Vatican has its own brand channel.
But in the early days, most marketers kept their distance, wary of the consequences of falling into disfavour with a mass audience. A few, however, ventured boldly into this new media neighbourhood, armed only with the outdated sales language of print and television. The YouTube community was waiting for them, in numbers, with shovels, rakes, and implements of destruction.
In the spring of 2006, Chevrolet decided to launch its revamped 2007 Tahoe by splashily sponsoring an episode of Donald Trump’s The Apprentice. Chevy presented the latte-fuelled herd of potential Trumps-to-be with an Internet micro-site, where anyone could cut, paste, and drag from the Tahoe maker’s selection of music and pictures, to create their own tribute to the vehicle. Initially, the venture was ranked a great success, as it yielded more than half a million visitors, each lingering an average of nine minutes on the site, and fetched thirty thousand entries, most of them glowing tributes to the Tahoe.
CLICK CLICK = KA- CHING,. KA- CHING
The success of an online idea is measured, in part, by the number of clicks a website gets. While that number can easily go into the millions, most advertisers are interested in “unique visitors.” These are determined by counting each visitor only once, which reveals a site’s true audience size. While this isn’t an exact science (some computers are shared by two or more users), it’s a fairly good estimate of the reach of an ad or website. Other research refines the profiles of users and the way they interact with each site by identifying the amount of time spent on each web page, the pages within a website that get the most traffic, and where the traffic is coming from. No matter what the statistics reveal, however, there is one overriding benefit related to online marketing clicks: the consumer has sought the website out. They may even have made quite an effort to find it. Because interaction with a website is not passive exposure (like TV ads, for instance), a marketer is much more likely to make an impact through advertising online than through other media.
Emphasis on most. Although things went smoothly at first, after awhile, the road started getting bumpy as snarky, skeptical entries began to appear. In the interests of credibility, Tahoe’s ad agency, Campbell-Ewald, opted not to pull the offending ads, which promptly spilled over onto YouTube. And there, the anti-Tahoe virus gained momentum.
Over beauty shots of the Chevy Tahoe, entries included such pungent graphics as “10 miles to the gallon, who cares?” Referring to the impact of large vehicles on global warming, one read “Enjoy the long summer.” Mocking the SUV as a symbol of male virility, another crowed: “How big is yours?” Parodies popped up like daisies, slamming the Tahoe for global warming, the war in Iraq, and what some saw as America’s maladjusted sexual self-image.
As an enormous online community watched, some cheering, others recoiling (and somewhere, Madame Defarge minding her knitting), Chevy’s Tahoe experiment was led to the cyber guillotine. It was official: YouTube had democratized ad messaging.
And the marketing world would learn one more important message at Chevy’s expense: YouTube videos don’t go away. Months after the ill-fated contest, you couldn’t swing a harp seal on an ice flow without hitting a Tahoe parody ad on YouTube (remain calm—no harp seals were harmed while writing this sentence). The new medium also became a repository for TV clips of newscasters and panels commenting on the disastrous Chevy campaign. The only remnants of the great Tahoe experiment that are difficult to find are legitimate, user-generated, pro-Tahoe videos.
Ad mes·sag·ing (noun) The wording, imagery, or creative means by which an ad is communicated.
Democracy, as the Chevy Tahoe folks learned, can be a testy business. For decades advertisers had enjoyed a free pass, communicating one-way to consumers who were powerless to respond in such a broad-based, public way. The SUV manufacturers might have been better prepared for the debacle had they read their history and come across the story about Thomas Jefferson on the day he was inaugurated as the third president of the United States. After the ceremony, Jefferson returned to his boarding house to discover that all the places at the dinner table were occupied. Fearing that it would be undemocratic to pull rank, the new president retired to his room without eating. Similarly, Chevy had to accept the inconveniences, as well as the blessings of democracy, as cranky consumers claimed their place at the electronic table, elbowing out more positive views of the new SUV.
After this episode, consumer-produced (“you-do-it”) commercials continued to be all the rage among big-brand marketers—but with one important difference. Entries were carefully vetted by advertisers before being released to the public. During the 2007 Super Bowl, for instance, after weeks of building buzz on the web and through the press, Doritos unleashed the winner of a user-generated video competition. Chevrolet was back on the scene, too, this time sponsoring a homemade TV ad competition among college students. The winner would have her work played during the Super Bowl—the queen mother of American sports broadcasts—and a job offer from Chevy’s ad agency, Campbell-Ewald. In both cases, the advertisers meticulously examined entries before presenting them to the world at large. For the Chevy competition, entries and finalists were kept secret until the winner was revealed; the YouTube community wouldn’t take them for a ride this time.
But the big questions remain. Can an advertiser recover its goodwill if an online idea backfires? Is there no such thing as bad publicity? I say there is. One of the sea changes that came with the emergence of the online world was that bad things never go away. They hang in cyberspace forever. In the old days, a bad brand experience might get some news coverage, but it would be quickly forgotten. Not so with the Internet. YouTube not only gave consumers a single gathering place to watch videos; it also gave them a permanent archive, and for the first time, a megaphone to comment on what they were seeing and a place to post wicked parodies and satire, many of which would be viewed more often than the original brand video.
This also raises the eternal question of what makes a good ad and what doesn’t. Why are some revered by millions of viewers, while others are pilloried? As with Hollywood and publishing successes, great ads have an X factor, something special yet intangible, such as an utterly unique performance that captured a piece of the zeitgeist in a bottle. I think every ad person will tell you that their greatest successes were complete surprises and that they would have bet the house on many of their failures. Here’s a case in point. In the mid-eighties, I was part of a creative team that produced a TV ad for wine brand La Piat d’Or. I hated the commercial because I thought it lacked a real idea and was just a bunch of soft-focus shots of a pretty Parisian actress. But that ad ended up running for years, and stores in places where the commercial was broadcast would literally sell out after it aired. A full fifteen years later, I was in a restaurant with my wife, and the waiter suggested the wine to us. I rolled my eyes, and my wife told him that I’d helped create the launch advertising for that wine but was haunted by the commercial. The waiter’s eyes lit up, and he squealed, “You did that ad? I loved that ad!” About five minutes later, I spotted the waiter in the round window of the kitchen door, pointing me out to the chef, who was smiling broadly.
Who knew?
Some of the biggest names in marketing learned hard lessons about YouTube’s ability to expose their weaknesses, effectively shouting in the light what was meant to be whispered in the darkness. In June 2006, for instance, thirty-year-old Vincent Ferrari of New York called a customer service rep to cancel his AOL account. He did not (to turn around a phrase) warn AOL that he was recording the conversation for quality-control purposes. For twenty-one minutes, the calm but alarmingly obstinate phone rep looked for ways to dissuade Ferrari from leaving the fold. With the coolness and patience of a man who understood the power of the recording he was making, Ferrari persisted, like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, knowing that AOL’s judgement cometh, and that right soon.
Armed with his evidence of the long conversation, Ferrari approached a local news station and told his story on the air. The resulting interview—including the recording—were posted on YouTube, and in six months, they were viewed over half a million times. News outfits picked up the story and reported similar experiences from other consumers, who complained it took them up to forty-five minutes to get an AOL account cancelled. The viral power of online video was too much. In full damage control mode, AOL issued a public apology and announced that “John,” the phone rep who’d spoken with Ferrari, was no longer representing the company. Elapsed time from the annoying phone call: ten days.
Would the story have resonated without YouTube? Maybe. With the same speed and impact? Not a chance.
It wasn’t long before savvy marketers began to understand the power of YouTube and viral videos, thus tapping into a vast, worldwide audience. An early success story was Evolution, a viral video made in Toronto for Dove. Created by Ogilvy & Mather, Toronto, it featured a now-famous time-lapse sequence of a young lady, who appears plain at first, without makeup or styled hair. The woman in the film was Stephanie Betts, a friend of Ogilvy & Mather art director Tim Piper, writer and co-director of the ad. The video begins—deliberately—with an almost amateurish feel, to lower viewers’ expectations. Then, in a time lapse, a team transforms her, applying makeup and washing, colouring, and styling her hair as background piano music and rapid sound effects create a sense of flow. Within seconds the woman is dramatically changed. Then computer enhancements alter the way her hair falls, the curves of her face, and the size of her eyes. Some facial features are downplayed; others are embellished. Most startling is the slight elongation of the woman’s neck—creating one of those “aha” moments for the viewer. Which of us civilians had noticed how a woman’s neck affects her look and the way others regard her? Next, the camera pulls back to reveal the young lady’s image on a billboard. By now, she’s a supermodel. Two young girls walk past the billboard on the street. Then the picture slowly dissolves to a black screen, where these words appear in white type: “No wonder our vision of beauty is distorted.” It then invites women to participate in the Dove “Real Beauty” workshop for girls and shows a website and a logo.
Life tends to take more time than art: the time-lapse and Photoshop effects used in Evolution actually took three weeks to create.
On a relatively low budget, and intended for the Internet, it made for irresistible viewing, accumulating more than ten million YouTube hits. It was among Time magazine’s top ten ads of the year, made the top of the list of YouTube viral ads, scooped the coveted Grand Prix in the film category at the Cannes advertising festival, and helped blaze the trail for a new generation of viral marketers.
It also appeared on TV and in cinemas in the Netherlands and in the Middle East.
Trust me, a Cannes Lion is a huge deal in itself, but Dove’s low-cost viral ad won in the “Film” category, which has been dominated since 1959 by high-budget, high-falutin’ TV and cinema ads. That caused aftershocks which are still felt today.
Like so many in the marketing world, Dove gleaned important lessons from the wreckage of the early explorers, such as Chevy. These new pioneers are rewriting the rules in a world where advertisers talk to consumers, and—lo!—consumers talk back. One marketing executive noted that his industry had spent most of the past fifteen years selecting the right channels to reach consumers, but they had never seen the consumer as a channel. David Lubars, chairman of BBDO North America, called this phenomenon “culture eats strategy.” Essentially, Lubars was referring to the way the public—and pop culture—can take a well-defined advertising strategy and wreak havoc with it, twisting and reconfiguring it and sending it back to the advertiser in virtually unrecognizable form.
For about 150 years advertisers had regarded themselves as leaders and consumers as followers. To the YouTube generation, marketers are more akin to those foolhardy rakes who run with the bulls each year in Pamplona. Those who can’t keep a few steps ahead find an eighteen-hundred-pound toro making a piñata of their nalgas.
A great idea drives a viral ad, just as it drives a great ad in traditional print and visual media. In 2004, before YouTube was a virtual gleam in its creators’ eyes, the Miami-based agency Crispin, Porter + Bogusky launched a remarkable, user-driven viral-marketing website called The Subservient Chicken. It helped define a new language for online branding and set a tone that showed others how to survive the online veldt, where ravenous consumers wait in the tall grass for a chance to pick off the weakest of the marketing herd.
The Subservient Chicken shows a live-action guy-in-a-chicken-suit standing in a plain-looking basement rec room. A blank line beneath the frame invites visitors to “Get chicken just the way you like it. Type in your command here.” When you type in “Sit,” the chicken sits; when you type, “Stand on your head,” he does just that. He reacts to any of hundreds of commands and offers a standard wagging of the finger in response to saucier suggestions. Word of mouth led to tens of millions of hits, with each visitor spending some six minutes on the site. Yet nowhere on the page is there any overt reference to Burger King. In fact, the link was so understated that it was regarded by many as nothing more than a rumour. The online authority Snopes.com was compelled to list the Subservient Chicken-Burger King connection among its urban legends, declaring it “true.”
The Subservient Chicken lives in a postal code nowhere near that of traditional fast-food advertising, but when someone inevitably asks, “What’s this chicken got to do with Burger King?” the marketing genius of the site shines through. The page and the Burger King brand are linked by a common idea: they both offer chicken “the way you like it.” By leading with its content, forgoing a traditional “sales” message, and burying the sponsor, it prompts visitors to discover for themselves who is behind the idea. Besides, the clever, viral, “un-advertising” feel of the site demonstrated that Burger King spoke fluent “Internet” and helped the marketing world understand that viral/interactive/online marketing doesn’t convey messages through mere words and headlines, product shots and slogans, and logos and promises: it communicates through ideas that challenge, stimulate, inspire, and—especially—surprise. Not in the sense of popping a balloon behind someone’s head to get their attention, but in the sense of always running a few steps ahead of the bulls.
Another brilliant, early entry into viral marketing was the series Will It Blend? Launched on YouTube in October 2006, it features Tom Dickson, founder of Blendtec, asking: “Will it blend? That is the question.” After a brief title sequence with suspiciously cheesy, almost game-show-like music, Dickson, in a lab coat, proposes to find out if some new object can be disintegrated in a Blendtec blender. A graduate (with honours) of the “Mister Rogers” school of TV demeanour, Dickson has actually blended an iPhone, incandescent light bulbs, glow sticks, and a Coke smoothie (with the Coke still in the can). Making each episode all the more fun and engaging is some form of built-in rationale: Dickson chose to blend a Grand Theft Auto IV game disk because he learned it didn’t include his personal favourite: a 1968 Mustang GT390 (Steve McQueen’s car in Bullitt). He decimated a handful of golf balls in retribution for a bad day on the course. Remarkably, invariably, the chosen thingamabob is pulverized, usually to a fine powder, and dumped on a flat surface, with the triumphant graphic “Yes, It Blends!”
At the end of the iPhone episode, Dickson said, “Think I’m gonna put this iPhone dust on eBay.” He did, and it sold for $901, which he donated to charity.
As product demonstrations, they’re little different from late-night infomercials or the barkings of “ShamWow” demonstrators at home shows. What sets Will It Blend? apart is its style and its packaging. As with so many great ad campaigns, segments are tightly structured around a series of deliciously honed “moments.” As the blender does its work, for example, there’s always a cutaway to Dickson, one hand on the blender, offering a frozen, cardboard smile, a moment that gets funnier with every viewing.
The tone is tongue-gently-in-cheek and good natured, with nary a word spoken on the virtues of the blender, no gratuitous prattle about how “no other blender can do this,” and no invocation to marvel at the machine. The series’ creators understand that the “star” of each film is, and should be, the destruction of some household item, harkening back to the days of David Letterman’s “Throwing Things Off a Five-Story Building” and “Crushing Things with a Steamroller” routines. Dickson’s deliciously dry and slightly stiff presentation is exactly what makes the videos work. Each episode also contains a surprise and is authentic—both hallmarks of a great ad campaign. The viewer is left with little doubt that the Blendtec blender can actually grind up a Wii remote, a picket sign, a baseball, or a fifteen-foot garden hose—and it can’t hurt to know this, given that a high-end Blendtec might run you $800.
As with all viral campaigns, the proof is found partly in the hit-count (the series has accumulated tens of millions of hits) and in the power of the online equivalent of word of mouth. I heard about the Blendtec YouTube episodes from my daughters, who had shown no previous inclination to blow a good chunk of their freshman-year tuition on a blender and who tsk’d, “Everybody knows about them.” More striking was the moment when my wife passed by as my daughters showed me the videos for the first time. Glancing over her shoulder, she said, “Wow. We need a new blender. What’s it called?”
This is viral persuasion at work. According to Blendtec, retail sales jumped 500 percent.
The lesson? Content is king, especially in the viral world. Build a better blender and the world yawns. Build a witty, well-structured, universally appealing series of viral videos and the world will beat a path to your virtual door, by way of YouTube. Most traditional ads are rarely as entertaining. Great viral ads don’t have to work as hard to build a brand, and there’s no media money required. You can post viral ads free of charge, and among the other freedoms they offer, there are no thirty-or sixty-second time constraints.
Most people introduced to the viral video Tagging Air Force One could be forgiven for wondering if a couple of real-life graffiti artists (taggers in graffiti-speak) had somehow breached security at Andrews Air Force Base and sprayed the words still free on one of the engines of the president’s plane. A show stealer at the Cannes advertising festival of 2006, Tagging Air Force One offers a link to stillfree.com, where designer Marc Ecko doesn’t sell you clothes but offers a ser-monette on the evils of presidential swagger. “The president can’t fly around like a rock star,” he said, “talking about how America is the greatest country in the world, but ignore what makes it great.” He went on to congratulate himself for his “tagging” video: “The nature of this stunt would … create a potential pop-culture moment for us all kinda to look back on and feel nostalgic about.” Behind the act of faux vandalism (yes, it was staged) was Dave Droga, the innovative mind of Droga5, who created the Million campaign. The “tagging” clip generated enough buzz to eclipse anything a television campaign was likely to have caused.
Dave’s mother used the family surname and a number to identify the clothing of each of her seven offspring. Dave was her fifth child. This irresistible story-behind-the-name is but a hint of Dave Droga’s marketing smarts.
The “Still Free” forces would boast that eighty-seven million people viewed the “tagging” video and that the story generated one hundred million news reports.
As a marketing device, the “tagging” non-stunt had two important strengths: first, no one tried especially hard to pass the film off as real (though it did prompt an investigation by the U.S. military and a denial from the Pentagon); second, you have to scour the Still Free website for any hint that anybody’s selling anything. The viral video wasn’t about selling clothes: it was about branding Mark Ecko—although that ultimately sells clothes. It’s a nifty gauge of how subtle “sell” has become in the YouTube era.
If you listened carefully at the Cannes advertising festival of 2006, where Still Free won the Cyber Grand Prix, you could hear the world’s marketers siphoning money from their TV budgets into newer, innovative, viral-driven media. Advertising is changing and so are its players. Dave Droga and others of the viral-ad, YouTube era represent the noncorporate, nonconformist antithesis of the two-martinis-with-lunch, house-in-the-Hamptons, wife-at-home/mistress-downtown, send-my-wife-a-box-of-the-$25-chocolates-you-know-the-kind-with-the-gold-wrapping, Mad Men image of advertising’s past.
Although Will It Blend? and Tagging Air Force One are both viral videos, they differ in one vital respect: one is a stunt, the other is a fantasy. One lures online voyeurs with the spectacle of a real CEO putting his iPhone into a blender. The other is a graffiti artist’s wet dream, where the tagger slips past the world’s most formidable security curtain to leave his mark on the president’s ride. But both attracted spectacular results through millions of online hits and millions of dollars’ worth of free publicity. Was the marketing world watching and learning? You bet.
Television advertising now has to look over its shoulder, knowing a skeptical online community is watching and a new generation of parody artists are ready to pounce. In other words, today’s ads need to do more than catch the imagination; they must also be parody proof, or at least repel parodies that are unflattering to the brand.
MasterCard’s once-ubiquitous Priceless campaign, for example, has provided the basis for some off-colour parodies. But the campaign still has longevity because it set out a paint-by-numbers formula for an ever-changing jest. It’s an elaborate descendant of the knock-knock joke: its structure is fixed and immediately familiar, yet each incarnation leads to a different punchline. Online users can take that formula for a ride down any road they please: from helping the cause of breast cancer awareness …
Breast exam: $100
Discovering the lump early and sharing the breast cancer
“scare” story with your girlfriends: Priceless.
For everything else, there’s MASTECTOMY.
… to crowing about a Phoenix Coyotes player scoring a penalty shot goal on a temperamental Patrick Roy …
Hockey stick: $48
Skates: $275
Official NHL puck: $10
Making a future Hall-of-Fame goalie cry like a little baby: Priceless.
“We can’t manage what happens out there,” conceded a MasterCard executive. The campaign “has taken on a life of its own.”
The equally prevalent Get a Mac campaign that personifies the PC and the Mac has also enjoyed a long and fruitful cyber-life, for a similar reason. The campaign was developed by TBWA\Chiat\Day, Los Angeles. Ad giant Lee Clow, the agency’s chairman and chief creative officer (and whom I had the pleasure of working with at Chiat\Day), created a separate unit to handle all Apple advertising and called it Media Arts Lab. Situated in a different building from the rest of TBWA, it houses about fifty staffers who work exclusively on Apple. Lee, who defines Media Arts as an “understanding of every touch point a brand has and then the artistry of using that to deliver a message” has also started this initiative because of his belief that a brand can, in fact, be a medium.
The Get a Mac campaign was built around a tight, simple, easy-to-parody formula, leading with the familiar “Hello, I’m a Mac.” / “And I’m a PC.” The ads themselves have yielded hundreds of thousands of YouTube hits, as have their endless parodies: “Hello, I’m a Republican” / “And I’m a Democrat;” “Hello, I’m a Christian” / “And I’m a Christ follower;” “Hello, I’m Chanukah” / “Hi, I’m Christmas.”
Both campaigns benefit from the viral spin of their creative formulae, using the online community to give their campaigns oomph unimaginable in the pre-Internet world. YouTube has emerged as the user-driven water cooler, giving voice to the tens of millions who gather daily to pass sentence on new products and campaigns and ideas. Viral campaigns, then, are not for marketing’s faint of heart. Like a snowball, a viral idea is released from the top of a hill, where no one can be sure of the size and shape it will take or whether it will meet an abrupt end against an unforgiving tree.
Samuel L. Jackson can rest easy knowing his career probably won’t be measured by the empty-calorie action film Snakes on a Plane. His place in the public imagination might more likely be attributed to the movie’s viral marketing campaign. By visiting an online site, anyone could arrange to have a customized phone call made to a friend by Mr. Jackson himself. “Terry,” he began in the call I received, “this is Samuel L. Jackson.” And so it was: the recording by Mr. Jackson requested that I attend the film. Better still, personal details were woven into the monologue: he knew where I worked (at an advertising company), what sort of car I drove (convertible), the name of the coworker who organized the call (Keith), and even what I looked like (follicly challenged). Each call was customized according to a number of drop-down options on the website. Industry buzz had it that the site drew a hundred thousand customized Samuel L. Jackson phone messages during its first twenty-four hours, enough to constipate the web server.
A generation ago, “big” ad campaigns typically relied on a massive (read: “expensive”) media buy. Today, a viral campaign leverages a big idea by using the online community as a free medium. Ideas—not slogans or logos or catchphrases—are the hot new currency in the age of persuasion. The guiding principles in this brave new world are “Outsmart, don’t outspend;” “Brain trumps brawn: film at eleven;” or “Available anytime on YouTube.” The same mass online audience that can stomp giant brands like a grape can spirit others to mountaintops.
When AdWeek magazine asked ad executives to tell them what had the greatest impact on advertising in an end-of-year article in 2006, the respondents overwhelmingly cited YouTube. It had become the great enabler: the first hugely democratic mass medium, where any one person could speak to millions if—and it’s a family-sized “if”—her idea was big enough to resonate with the masses in cyberspace.