Archive for the ‘video’ Category

Must Viral Videos Start with a :30?

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

Last week the folks at our office were passing around links to the commercial above from Old Spice. It’s another manly ad from the brand’s agency, Wieden+Kennedy, and it certainly earned lots of LOLs in our office space. I personally found it amusing but very rushed. Many of the words are said so quickly that I missed them and had to go back. I wondered why the pace was so quick, until I began to recall sitting in an editing suite reviewing commercials with my then-agency when I used to be a brand manager at P&G. It came together for me when I looked down at the total time of the video on the corner of the screen and saw :30. Yep, this was a TV commercial also uploaded to YouTube.

Now, let me begin by saying that I don’t have an incredibly strong opinion on this case. Regular readers know that I usually come down hard one way or the other in these blog posts. But in this situation I have more of a working theory to air—and I’m not soft-pedaling just because Old Spice is a brand from one of our big clients, Procter & Gamble, and one of my long-time friends works on the brand.

My working theory is that starting with the 30-second ad is no longer the right way to do branded video. Note first that I am talking “branded video” instead of “commercials.” I think a lot of smart marketers and agencies are starting to reset how they think about “sight, sound, and motion” and are defining their success by whether or not people are choosing to view and share their marketing, rather than the number of impressions that can be bought.

My point is this: In a world in which it is more important for people to choose to engage with video, you can work without the confines of a 30-second box. One of the best early examples is BMW films, which became a DVD series. Other examples range from Will It Blend to the recent Coca-Cola Happiness Factory that I blogged about a few days ago. In these cases the focus is on creating video that people enjoy viewing. With this freedom, filmmakers can go to two minutes and far beyond. Remember, 30 seconds is no magical measure of the ideal consumer attention span—but rather a number that worked for TV networks to slam in multiple messages between content breaks.

So it feels to me that Old Spice and its agency started with the 30-second hole to fill and fought to push its funny content into the box, rather than making the most fun video possible, posting that online, and then, perhaps, placing an edited version onto the TV screen. Then again, people have chosen to view the Old Spice video on YouTube about 1.5 million times (and counting). I might be wrong. What do you think?

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Posted in Organizational Behavior, video | 3 Comments »

Coke Captures a Moment of Happiness

Thursday, January 21st, 2010


I believe that one of the biggest opportunities for Marketing with Meaning lies with brands that are used to spending a lot of money on traditional advertising campaigns that have historically been launched mainly to remind people that the brands exist. Instead, they have an opportunity to create marketing that people choose to engage with and advertising that itself adds value to people’s lives. A few weeks ago I wrote about how brands that lack innovation can win by adding value, and last year this article I wrote in Adweek showed how brands such as Gatorade and Ask.com have hurt sales by continuing to trot out new ad campaigns. One company that is gradually moving forward on the meaningful marketing scale is Coca-Cola—and the video above is just its latest chapter in its next evolution.

Coca-Cola has been one of the biggest traditional advertisers out there, but I do believe it is turning itself into a meaningful marketing machine. In my book I included the examples of its Happiness Factory mini-movies, and its industry-leading Coke Rewards loyalty program. The company got into entertaining iPhone apps quickly. And in Cannes in July I wrote up the example of its new interactive vending machines.

I believe the biggest lesson here is that Coke has focused its Brand Purpose on “Creating Happiness.” If you step back and think about what the Coca-Cola product aspires to do, it tries to create a moment of happiness in an otherwise regular day. Traditionally the company has tried to inspire happiness through its marketing by showing carefully crafted ads with actors playing out scenes in commercials. In truth, this viral video is not too far away from an “ad”—but the key difference is that we see Coca-Cola doing something fun in the real world, and we smile, LOL, and forward this video to friends.

There is another smaller, yet important lesson here around how in-person, guerrilla marketing efforts can go viral and gain scale when you capture them on video. This mirrors the approach by Burger King in its award-winning Whopper Freakout campaign. In both cases the production quality and editing of this piece is fantastic, we see real people and reactions rather than scripted actors, and we actually can see and feel the fun for ourselves.

Of course we have no way of seeing if this video sells six-packs, but the YouTube results suggest this effort was worth the cost of a video crew and handful of props. When I first saw this video on its first day, Tuesday, January 12, there were about 40,000 views. Writing this post on Sunday, January 17 it was up to 400,000. That’s a lot of people choosing to engage with an ad, and coming away with a much more positive connection with the brand. And it’s even more evidence that billion-dollar traditional brands can make the move to Marketing with Meaning.

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Posted in Connection, Entertainment, purpose, video | 1 Comment »

Hulu Makes a Move Away from Interruption

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

If you’re not a regular subscriber to Wired magazine, it’s worth the 5 bucks next time you’re at the airport if only to read the feature article on the new Fox/NBC online TV venture called Hulu (or you can just read it for free here). The Hulu story is a great lesson in new product marketing by not one, but two large, stodgy corporations with much of their business stuck in the status quo. Jason Kilar, the 36 year-old Hulu CEO managed to throw together an online television program with thousands of shows in a matter of weeks.  Hulu is growing rapidly and starting to challenge YouTube.

Aside from the outstanding innovation case study, Hulu is serving as a new benchmark in the future of advertising and mass media. The company is still showing advertising, as expected, but it has significantly decreased the number of ads as compared to traditional broadcast television. According to the article, Hulu is charging more but serving far fewer ads.

Let’s say the average prime-time cost per thousand viewers (CPM) ad rate is $25, which is a reasonable estimate. Television shows are averaging 8 minutes of commercials for every 30 minutes of programming, which means 16 30-second slots at $25 each. This makes the “effective” CPM for a program equal to $400.  On Hulu, the company claims that ad rates are “two to three times” that of broadcast TV. Let’s call it 2.5 times on average, meaning the ad rate is $62.50. However, Hulu is only showing two minutes of advertising per 30-minute show, or only four 30-second ads. As a result, it’s take is $250 per show, meaning that for every viewer who watches The Office on Hulu instead of regular TV, NBC loses 47% of its ad revenue.

You can’t protect old business models artificially.” – Peter Chernin, President, News Corporation

How is Hulu getting away with this? Well, the company realizes that the only way to win in online video is to put its consumers first and provide more value. And it believes great content and a modest amount of advertising will be satisfactory for the greedy online video viewer. The hope is that viewers rely on Hulu versus YouTube and other free and/or illegal options such as BitTorrent. The results seem strong so far: One analysis suggests that Hulu could beat YouTube in revenue this year.

Aside from dramatically cutting the amount of advertising per program, there are some other user-friendly marketing options here. Hulu sometimes offers the chance to select which ads you see. And there is a thumbs-up/thumbs-down button for advertising, which supposedly helps ensure that you receive better interruptions in the future.

I certainly do not believe that Hulu represents Meaningful Marketing.  It still relies on an interruptive advertising model that gets in the way of the content viewers actually want to see. But Hulu’s moves and early success are proof that the only way to win in the future is to get closer to what people want.

Side Note: While Hulu shows a dramatic decrease in advertising, the Chicago Tribune just revamped its newspaper to increase advertising to 50% of the total content.

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Posted in Television, content, video | No Comments »