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.

Chris Anderson from Wired talks about the economies of abundance and how it is driving the most successful businesses in the new century.

Money quote:

My new policy is that I will do anything the interns think I should do.  The interns told me I should do a press conference in Second Life.  So I did. 

Related links within techRivet.com

• Digg is Broken - Virtual Shrodingers Law
• Viral Advertising as Content

We have seen lately the complaints surrounding the gaming of "Digg". [linky] Wherein a small number of power users influence the vast majority of Digg ratings. First of all these people need a life, secondly this highlights the primary weakness of Digg. It rewards power users. It does this if in no other way by allowing people to see the links and how high they are rated and who voted on them.

Virtual Schrödinger's Law
Each single piece of visibility into the workings of the system makes it less efficient. Knowledge of the effects you have on the system affects the outcome of the system. This is the Virtual Schrödinger'sLaw: you cannot both see the content and see the rating on the content without being influenced by bias.

The wisdom of crowds gets influenced by the bias of crowds.
Unpopular topics to the biased crowd will not get as many dissenting votes. There is an echo-chamber effect that then occurs. A self-replicating bias entrenches itself. People outside of the crowd bias do not participate, the vision narrows and the echo-chamber shrinks.

Digg becomes biased.

If there were a system that allowed for a "digg" or a "bury" without any of the "ego" feedback that is given with digg.com, a more democratic outcome could be achieved.

There already is a system that satisfies that requirement.

It's called stumble upon.
Stumble upon provides the voting functionality without the "ego" feedback loop. In essence it hides the useless UI. The end user has no list to traverse, the wisdom of crowds is not influenced by the bias of crowds. The Virtual Schrödinger's law is upheld.

After installing the stumble upon toolbar, practically nobody goes to the stumble upon site. You don't need to go there, there is no point. You don't need to read any lists. All you do is set up your interests / categories and the sites are brought to you.

You vote thumbs-up or thumbs-down and that's it.  Egos of power users are not stroked. The quality of the site and the potential for its rating to go up or down is not influenced by arbitrary bias. [linky] btw - my experience with traffic closely mirrors the last link's.

You don't see the link and the rating on the link at the same time. The rating on the link is hidden from the user.

The wisdom of crowds is not influenced by the bias of crowds. QED.

Update: Here is the wikipedia entry for Schrödinger's Cat: [linky]. Also there was a comment left questioning my use of Schrödinger instead of Heisenberg.  I think it may be a valid point, but I like the cat thought experiment.  [Heisenberg]

Update 2: Someone else has posted essentially the same article: http://www.howtoliveonline.com/2007/06/why-stumbleupon-is-better-than-digg-to.html

If you remember seeing this video:

Well Frank [linky] claims to have unleashed it upon the world. Not that he created it, but that he discovered it and blogged it and that got dugg and the rest is history.

He posted a follow up video from the professor of anthropology at Kansas State University: Michael Welsh who created the first video.  In it he explains the video.

Pretty dang cool professor Welsh, way to go.

Update: One of the professor's inspirations: We Are the Web by Kevin Kelly.

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

Let’s consider the human creature. It is a curious beast that responds to pretty lights and flashing pictures fairly readily.

Case in point, TV. Television is one of the most powerful inventions ever created, for any of you out there that have children you know the power of the TV. Turn on the switch and they quiet down and all their attention is sucked into the CRT…er sorry, LCD screen.

The burst of video onto the internet is merely the latest in a long line of shiny digital baubles to bedazzle humans.

But what simpletons we.

The clips circulating are self perpetuating. The pointless ones never rise above inconsequence; some of the good ones also languish in obscurity. But the best ones, the prime ones, rise and rise.

The term tossed around by the technorati is viral. This is a good word because it explains our helplessness in the wave of mob popularity. What gets seen is what gets promoted higher, which is what gets seen which is what gets promoted.

The circle continues.

The content creator has it in his power to deliver the video to many sites, in fact not only does the content creator do this but anyone can…and anyone and everyone does...

Soon the same video becomes available on more and more websites. But we, the human, don’t notice, or more likely don’t care.

The question arises when are we saturated? When are there too many videos on too many sites for differentiation to happen? What draws the eyeballs?

Because as you can see…

There is no lack of places that the same popular video appears…

And still we continue to watch…

Stupid, stupid humans…

We are not designing machines that will take over the world via their evil genius; we are designing machines that will blunt our intelligence until they can knock our staring head off our body like flicking an olive.

…pretty…butterflies…looook…bubbles…