MarketingInsideOut.com

Remember the Doritos super bowl contest? Well, it turns out that according to Jason McDonell, director of marketing for the brand, the online effort and contest ultimately racked up one billion impressions, equal to $36 million in paid media.

Plus of course all the coverage for being one of the handful of advertisers to run a user generated content spot during the big game.

As a followup to the effort, check out Snackstongproductions.com where you can see the Dale Backus spot that won the contest. I still liked Mousetrap best.

I was just released from Milkatraz. I got nabbed trying to steal the last glass of milk and was forced to do hard time (for a few seconds anyway).

Tonight I finally got a chance to check out the Get The Glass online game created as part of the latest overall Got Milk campaign from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners.

I’m impressed. Not just with the sophisticated, yet retro, feel of the online game (which is way cool by itself), but with the entire Mission Impossible meets Raiders of the Lost Ark nature of the campaign and the brilliance of the strategy behind the effort.

The long running Got Milk campaign has, by all measures, been an incredibly successful effort for the California Milk Processor Board. But what really impresses me is how it has been kept so creative and fresh over the years while staying spot-on strategy.

The latest version, dubbed Get the Glass, launched this week and includes 7 television spots and the online game and will run through December. You can see the new spots on the game web site.

These coasters for the Mumbai Police were printed using a special invisible red ink, which spreads only when moistened. So when you put your beer on the coaster and then lift to drink, you are looking at a face that appears to be bleeding. The graphic visual combined with copy that reads “Just a reminder: Drunken driving kills” certainly gets the message across.

From Ads of the World

Major yuck! I’ve completely lost my appetite.

This from a Yahoo news story:

“News video showing about a dozen rats running around a KFC-Taco Bell restaurant in Greenwich Village was widely disseminated Friday on TV stations and the Internet.

The footage, taken from the sidewalk through a window, showed the rats running around the floor, between counters and tables and on children’s high chairs. The establishment was not open at the time.

News crews flocked to the scene, and onlookers gave a play-by-play as the rodents moved about. When one rat came close to the window, a person on the sidewalk said: “He’s coming for his close-up.”

Though it’s just one small franchisee shop in New York, the story has spread like crazy. This all started Friday morning and by Friday night, the rat story was seen worldwide. Nothing like this stays isolated. Just type “rats at KFC” in the search field on Technorati and you’ll see over 1400 blog posts. There are thousands of stories on Google.

The only statement I found from YUM was this: “This is completely unacceptable and is an absolute violation of our high standards,” Yum Brands said in a statement.

Maybe they don’t feel they have to do much since it was a franchise and not a company owned location, but they seem to forget that this is their brand that is being affected. They should probably be a bit more stand up about this. It will be interesting to see how badly the brands are damaged by this very gross situation.

In The passenger, Nokia shows a new way for users to control and interact with video on the web. This live-action driving game, shot on film in the dark streets of Paris, put you in the drivers seat to navigate around the city to specific destinations. It was created to support Nokia’s push to be part of the growing in-car communications market with the Nokia Multimedia Car Kit CK-20W.

It’s a pretty engaging and lifelike experience that demos the product well in a James-Bond-in-Paris sort of way. If you drive the wrong way, you’ll find yourself insulted by the the rude Femme Fatal in your passenger seat. Despite driving way to fast and taking 90 degree corners I didn’t crash the car although I was subjected to a few insults from my passenger.

Put together by Hyper Happen, Fuel Industries and Karbon Arc.

Via Adrants: “It’s got Mountain Dew’s twisted tongue-in-cheek style all over it but the Dew’s staying mum about its involvement with the aging, crunk-loving album ripper.”

With their cheesy HGTV-like lead in music, there’s the MashUp and Sue customizing her “kicks”.

If it’s a fideo campaign, speculation is that it’s Super Bowl related. Guess we will just have to wait and see if Sue does Miami on Feb 4.

Either way, I love these. And I love Sue.

First Time makes “You” the person of the year. Now AdAge makes The Consumer the Agency of the Year. But Jonah Bloom says they didn’t copy Time…that they had the idea first…yeah sure…whatever.

Anyway…

It would have been FCBdraft except for that little Wal-Mart fisasco. But in the AdAge panel re-vote, a real agency like…say Goodby, was beat out, in large part, because of a piece created by two guys (one a juggler and one a lawyer) with way too much time on their hands. The now infamous Diet Coke & Mentos Experiment — millions watched it, hundreds of media outlets covered it and the mint in question enjoyed a 15% spike in sales.

Sure I watched them. You probably did too. I even wrote a blog about one of the experiments. They are all over YouTube and damn near every blog and industry rag. You couldn’t help but watch — in the same way you can’t help but look while passing a car accident. Or pause to watch a funny snippet on TV’s America’s Bloopers of someone getting kicked in the balls. It’s our nature. Our voyeuristic curiosity to enjoy something funny, chuckle at something stupid happening to other people, ponder something strangely off-beat or gawk at something we don’t routinely see.

But…did they set out to increase sales like an agency would be tasked to do? With a real strategic focus? Doubtful. These guys just wanted their 15 minutes of fame. And they found a very visual, funny, ninth-grade-science-class way of getting it that we all thought was fun to watch and share. The impact on the products involved was most likely…a lucky accident. Something they didn’t even remotely consider until after they started getting so much buzz.

I think the consumer-in-control, consumer generated content, consumer is king/queen issue is a major one facing the advertising industry and thankfully pushing the agency industry to step it up and embrace a real conversation with consumers. But for the industry publication to vote The Consumer as agency of the Year? That’s a real stretch to me.

From the AdAge story:

From an agency perspective, there are exactly three ways to look at the rise of consumer control. The first view is like something out of the Book of Revelation — all conquest, war, famine and death. Happily, the ad industry, thanks to countless foretellings of the death of the 30-second spot and pretty much every other Madison Avenue institution, by now has gotten used to apocalyptic visions of its future, so this will mean minimal leaps out of windows.

The second way of looking at this is to pretty much reject the notion that there’s any fundamental change at all. This is perhaps best espoused by Euro RSCG New York Executive Creative Director Jeff Kling, who responds thusly to the suggestion that consumers could one day unseat agencies at the right hand of marketers: “I think the idea that this represents a threat to ad agencies is patently absurd and drummed up to have something interesting to discuss. I don’t know anyone who fears for his job. Companies have always wanted to gain control over what’s said about them. It used to be letters to the editor; now it’s consumer-generated content. Advertising has the same role it’s always had, and managing and leveraging all that content that’s out there is classic creative direction.”

We arrive rather dialectically at the third way: an acknowledgment that there are lessons to be learned but those lessons don’t necessarily herald the end of the ad agency as we know it.

People have been personalizing stamps, credit cards, and gift cards online for some time, so why not design-it-yourself (DIY) commercials?  Whether the viral marketing phenomenon becomes a pandemic is debatable, although you can argue that some of these homemade commercials are infectious in the way they’re attracting attention – both intended and unintended.  Consider the recent online contest for the Chevy Tahoe which generated a reported 2.4 million page views on http://www.chevyapprentice.com/ and led to more than 21,000 submissions, including thousands of faux ads by critics of the SUV. 

While GM screened the ads for offensive content like last year’s tasteless suicide bomber spot that plagued Volkswagon, the company did not play censor, which was well advised from a PR perspective.  Imagine the outbreak of public opinion had the company stonewalled its critics.

Meanwhile, the viral marketing bandwagon continues to roll along as popular brands like AllStar Converse, Microsoft, Toyota, L’oreal Paris and Sony jump on board.  Mastercard offers a Web site where people can create their own versions of the “Priceless” ad campaign.  Mutations of viral marketing are also appearing like the “Subservient Chicken”  who closely resembles Bozell’s former agency mascot “Flippy” (laid to rest after falling victim to bird flu). 

As a participant sport, viral marketing represents a pick up game that’s fun to play without risking the “agony of defeat” experienced by major league teams.  And the buzz created for the brands involved is not something to sneeze at, even though it may cause advertisers an occasional headache.  

This, Part I report and tips from MarketingSherpa worth a read:

On July 4th 1996, Hotmail founders Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia launched what’s widely credited to be the first on-purpose Internet viral marketing campaign. Back then there was no online video, no easy peer-to-peer file sharing, no sophisticated games, and practically no HTML email.

Instead, this groundbreaking campaign was a just a simple line of text stuck at the end of every single email sent that offered recipients their own free account.

Within 18 months the service had 8.7 million users, and Smith and Bhatia sold out for an estimated $400 million to MSN.

Now, tens of thousands of campaigns later, viral’s settled into what you could call a rut. Despite the fact that every campaign’s success depends on being so creative, so utterly forwardable, that consumers can’t help but spread the news, most campaigns are cookie cutter.

You know the drill. The amusing video download, the interactive ecard, the engaging game, the forward-to-a-friend sweeps entry, etc. It’s all getting a bit too boring for both marketers and consumers alike.

Can viral be saved?

Marketers…heads up. Now there’s a really easy way word of mouth can get around. Buzz-o-phone, launched by Matt Galloway earlier this month as an experiment in the power of word of mouth. It’s intriguing and worth watching to see if lowering the amount of effort required to share an opinion makes consumers more apt to do so. To praise, rant or blast — consumers just call the buzz-o-phone toll free number(1-800-591-5375), and for up to two minutes they are recorded. And the recorded calls are then available to listen to (through various podcasters including the iTunes Store and on the buzz-o-phone web site.)