heh.

Here's a clip:

This is pretty funny.  In a way it reminds me of the Terry Tate - Office Linebacker campaign by Reebok.

This is an expansion on techRivet's series of advertising as content:

• Viral Advertising as Content: Fight for Kisses
• Update: Viral Advertising as Content
• Viral Advertising as Content

And elsewhere:

• Human Skateboarding - who knew?

Let's dial back the history machine to the grand year of 2000.  AOL is the 800 pound gorilla in the room and merges with Time Warner.  It is seen by a large percentage of people online as the DE FACTO INTERNET.

This is near the height of its dominance, plus or minus.  From there the rapid acceptance of broadband connections, which circumvented AOL's revenue stream which relied on telephone modem connections, and the growing education of the average user that AOL was in fact not the de facto internet led to its rapid fall.

By 2007 the total value of AOL stock had plummeted from $226 Billion down to $20 Billion and its subscriber base had shrunk by two thirds from 30 million down to 10 million.

Are we seeing a reflection of that same scenario taking place in the Social Network space?

The Market is Changing

Generation MySpace is getting fed up

Have social network sites peaked?  Are we seeing similar superior substitutes available to consumers? Are there consumer learning effects taking place? 

MySpace, the largest social network, has slipped from a peak of 72 million users in October to 68.9 million in December, ComScore says.

In short is the market changing faster than the social networking sites can react?

MySpace, started 1999 and sold in 2005 for $580 million has a similar lifespan as AOL at the time of its merger with Time Warner.  It was bought at what may become its near height.

It is seen as the DE FACTO method of creating a social network on the internet.  If you want to connect with your "friends" you set up a page on MySpace and away you go.

What happens when people realize there are alternatives that in many ways are superior.  What if you can connect with your friends using tools that are not attached to a single social network platform?  What happens after you have educated your user base to a certain level?

Superior Value: Wordpress.com - here you can set up a blog in a matter of minutes.  It comes with many of the same tools as MySpace but with potentially a more distributed experience and a much lower annoyance level.

Setting up your own social network: MyBlogLog - with this tool you can establish a network of friends out in the ether without joining a Social Network Platform.

These are only two examples of a wide variety of substitutes both in a personal site platform and a social networking tool.  Why limit yourself to one, make several.

Ads are a) not paying well or b) making users leave.

So this is a constant in the online ad realm.  You want to make your ad all "Pink and Flashing" without making your ad actually "Pink" or "Flashing".

The Social networking sites have very poor CTR (click through rates).  To increase the CTR they are making the ads more "Pink and Flashing".  And their users hate it and are leaving.

What's the fix?

I don't know if there is one.

With the availability of substitutes that can satisfy users needs without the drawbacks associated with remaining inside Social Network Platforms the only remaining barrier becomes switching costs.  At some point those switching costs will be judged by the user to be lower than the annoyance of remaining.

*Here is a switching cost reducer: MySpace Friend List Export - Code now available

Essentially, why should you stay if you can improve your experience and bring all your friends along?

Come back in 2 years and we'll review.

About the Microsoft offer to buy Yahoo!

Nope.

Not gonna do it.

Go somewhere else to read about it.

...oh ok...since you forced me to.

Damn! but what a bold move!

It is a curious move though, in some regards because in many respects Microsoft and Yahoo have competing platforms: email, search, advertising.  But where the rubber meats the road in Internet superhighway is in the size (and quality) of audience.

Google has been able to charge a premium for its advertising because it has the largest audience.

This merger would put the combined Yahoo - Microsoft search engine market share at a near parity with Google.  Therefore they would be more able to compete in the market place.

It remains to be seen if they can successfully merge the two efforts successfully, not a simple task.

You know it.

So I previously pointed to this: [The Best Rube Goldberg Machine] as the best Rube Goldberg machine.  That may be...for amateurs, but this commercial by Guiness is awesome.

Too bad it is not a TRUE Rube Goldberg machine.  There were many sequences spliced together.

The advert took a week to film, with some of the sequences having to be reshot up to 15 times.

New Guiness Advert: Giant domino village

Still it's a fun commercial.

Advertising as content.  Brilliant ad.

It's entertaining.

It stays on the companies message...

Funny.  Cute.  Has a baby...check, check, check.

And they did it all in cgi. This was obviously a requirement due to the baby being a ninja master. But it works. It has a certain Shrek-ness about it that imbues even a bit more humor into it.

A+ effort.

Update: Wilkinson has a website devoted to the campaign - www.ffk-wilkinsong.com.  The trailer is there, it talks about the characters, goodies, and a game.  A 96 megabyte downloadable game.  So this is not an inexpensive proposition to create.  It is merely  exploiting a non-traditional channel.

This falls into the subject my friend Todd Sawicki wrote about here: http://www.techrivet.com/2007/03/28/whyViralIsntFree.aspx.

Although I could argue that the viral campaign has other goals in mind besides bottom line sales.  Increasing awareness in the consumer to your brand is also a valid goal, just one much harder to measure.

Update 2: The game is pretty lame...not worth the download time.  Picture a slower, less fun, stupider, mortal combat.

Anyways, here's a screenshot.

I'll be leaving tomorrow morning for ad:tech San Francisco.  I'll give some updates over the next couple of days and a review on Friday.

For now here's the link: http://www.ad-tech.com/sf/

And some basic info:

ad:tech San Francisco will examine the "content explosion" occurring between channels, devices, brands and consumers, and many of the new strategies and practices this environment is demanding - from social networking to digital television.

There are some interesting seminars: http://www.ad-tech.com/conference-sf.asp

And the blog: http://www.adtechblog.com/

I figure I should I stop my man-love fest for Mark Cuban on my blog for a moment to take a slightly different view of viral marketing from Greg's utopia below.

Viral marketing isn't free and it sure ain't easy.  Yes it can be cheap but creating viral content takes time and money.  A professionally produced outsourced video with a small production shop would cost anywhere from $5k to $50k.  That's a pretty substantial sum of money in marketing plan for anything but a mega-corporation (and having owned my fair share of marketing budgets I can assure you $50k is a chunk o' change).  Let's say it was $50k for blendtec and as a result of the publicity they sold 5,000 units above trend - then the marketing cost per unit would be $10.  That's not exactly spectacular.  Of course, if they sold 50,000 more units $1/unit isn't look so bad.

The challenge with "viral" content is that it is very difficult to predict and given the upfront costs hard to gauge its appropriateness.  Sure if it's a huge hit on youtube and gets 1 million views - that sounds like a great deal for a few thousand dollars.  But what if it was viewed 100 times?  Yikes.  For that $5k, at $0.50 cpm you could have run a banner campaign that hit 10,000,000 users guaranteed.  Food for thought.

Viral content is great, it's just hard to build a business around.  Use it sparingly and treat it as a total flier - ie. treat the effort (resources, dollars, staffing time, etc.) as if you are playing with house money.  And as hollywood folks will be sure to tell - hits are perhaps the most unpredictable thing you can imagine.  No one gets fired for hits, but hollywood is littered with the carcases from flops.

I saw this yesterday morning on CBS Sunday Morning news show.  They were talking about the Youtube awards.  The story was an amalgamation of a couple of posts I've done here: 21st Century Jobs and this post here: Viral Advertising As Content

In the story they interview the guys that created LonelyGirl15 and also "Dancing" Matt Harding and then they interview Tom Dixon from BlendTec.

Blendtec is a commercial blender company trying to sell their products into the consumer market.  At the urging of a marketing (and I assume younger) employee they've been running a video series on youtube called "Will it Blend".  It now has its own website WillItBlend.com.

The key question is what impact did the Youtube posting have on sales.  The first piece of information that came out in the interview is that the video series has had in excess of 6 million views.  Can you say wow.

The interviewer then asks how has it impacted Blendtec's bottom line.  Tom Dickson, the inventor and CEO of BlendTec, says "Yes absolutely! ... thousands of percent more."

...and they did this essentially for FREE!

Well as compared to any old school media format, it's essentially Free.  Extraordinary.

Here's the CBS report (on youtube...heh...how long it will stay there I don't know)

It's also over at the CBS Sunday Morning home page [bottom right] for now: CBS Sunday Morning

The future of advertising is uncertain, you must connect with your consumers. But how do you do this?

Example #1: SneauxShoes.com - Human Skateboard - It's brilliant and works on so many levels.

First of all it's just dang entertaining. The whole concept is original. The craftmanship is just right.

But after getting over the entertainment value you have to admire the targeting here. This is an advertisment for shoes. For slacker shoes, (i.e. skateborder). Let's take a look at this in a check list format.

1. Entertaining - check.
2. leverages viral network (youtube) - check
3. Let's consumers have an impact on the brand - check
4. You get what they are trying to sell - and it ain't just the shoes ( it's also the image) - check

...and on top of that it is very cheap, and probably reaches its demographic better than a traditional media ad would be able to do. Anectdotally, just me showing it to a couple of friends here...they all sent it off to there friends, whom I would assume would send it off to theirs and so on and so on...

Lesson. You can save money AND have a more targetted reach by leveraging the "free" viral network available to you in Youtube and like minded video sharing sites. A pre-requisite is an ENTERTAINING piece of content. The value of the entertainment must be high to be viral

Example #2: Smirnoff's Tea Partay! - Keeping it Real in Cape Cod y'all!

Beautiful. This video actually contains commentary on two separate cultures within the U.S. There is a fairly deep thesis buried inside this comedic advertisment video. Concerning who has the power, who has cool, who REALLY has cool, and who REEALY REEAAAALLY has cool. I'll leave it for you to figure it out because this post is about how the ad-as-content works not about any societal commentary.

But back to the check list

1. Entertaining - check.
2. leverages viral network (youtube) - you bet
3. Let's consumers have an impact on the brand - check
4. You get what they are trying to sell - all the image - it is just a mid range vodka after all. - check

After looking at the Tea Partay website I would actually argue that Smirnoff devoted too much effort into the site. The value of viral advertising is the ability for people to take your video (or other piece of entertaining ad content) and send it around the net. Email it, put it on their myspace page, put it in their blog, send their friends to it, etc. Having a webpage where people can go is not the priority.

I believe that Smirnoff's money would have been better spent by making a $50k (me guessing) brochure type website instead of the $250k+ (me guessing again) pretty flash based website and invest the difference into a sequel video.

It isn't about the home base anymore. It's about the distributed ad. The distributed piece of content.

Reebok needs to bring back Terry Tate: sniff, sniff, I miss him

Hat tip: www.jaffejuice.com