We Tube -They Tube - You Tube

Suppose you make a video at little or no expense and transfer it to a video sharing site such as Peekvid, Ourmedia, Yahoo Video or, of course, YouTube. This video might be crude or in questionable taste. It might only be a long form commercial or shameless plug. So far you’ve got company – lots of it. There are dozens of such sites hosting millions of videos. Let’s stick with YouTube. It has not only the brand recognition but also the audience. Nielsen estimated over 66 million unique visitors in January 2008.

Now the hard part – getting someone other than friends and family to view and respond to your latest media marvel. The double appeal of YouTube is a potentially large audience combined with a low price. On line videos have the potential to become an epidemic as friends email links to friends, who in turn mail to their friends and so fourth.

A now classic case is that of Blendtec and its series of “Will It Blend” videos. For example, the industrial strength blender shows it can, for example, reduce a garden hose or a small appliance to granular residue. The company reports substantially increased site traffic and conversion to sales of its blenders, the least expensive of which is $ 399.95.

The Blendtec videos vividly illustrate the products value while providing amusement and a viral tidbit, easily emailed to a friend. Such cases are also quite rare – the fate of most online videos is instant oblivion. Still, online video is certainly worth a test, as long as you control costs. Two current distinct YouTube campaigns come to mind.

To promote its budget priced Corolla brand, Toyota sponsored a YouTube video contest http://www.youtube.com/sketchies2. This seems ideal for the younger budget oriented market. The contest videos have attracted an audience. The top 10 finalists combined have been viewed about 408 thousand views in the past month.

This is good traffic, but much of it by passes Toyota’s YouTube site (its so called channel) and goes directly to the entries. The Sketchies II channel received only 84 thousand visits in the past month. It also seems not to have helped Toyota’s own site, which curiously contains no references to Sketchies.

Regardless of how well you like the entries, they seem unrelated to Toyota or its Corolla. They neither tell nor show the benefits of Corolla, nor do they promote association to its brand.

This still might have made sense as an experiment. Have an idea – spend a few bucks and test it. The automotive category is crowded and boring. There are far too many shots of similar looking cars traversing similar mountain roads. The problem is that Toyota is reported to have spent $ 4,000,000 (Wall St. Journal, 3/10/08) on the campaign. This is not a lot compared with Toyota’s total marketing spending, but it’s a lot for a promotion which doesn’t promote.

GetSmartContest

Boomers, students of TV history, and fans of re-reruns may remember Get Smart – the 60’s comedy series about the misadventures of clueless counterspy Maxwell Smart – starring the late comedian Don Adams. A key prop of the series was the, for the time, futuristic shoe phone. This was a mobile phone before its time imbedded in a shoe. Max had to remove his shoe to use it, and it usually rang at an inopportune time.



To promote it release of an upcoming feature movie version of Get Smart, Warner Brothers sponsored a YouTube video contest. Unlike Sketchies, the demands of this contest are slight – 20 seconds using a shoe as a phone. This should increase participation. Heck, I might make an entry using the webcam built into my laptop.


This YouTube event may or may not help the movie. Its incremental cost is slight and it is a potentially effective way to recruit a new generation of Get Smart fans. Its You Tube channel has received over 610,335 views this month. Excuse me, my shoe phone is ringing.

Confessions of a Control Freak

Those Who Can Do
- the rest give seminars

Rather than rail against the legions of puny pundits, who can give marketing advise but can’t really market; I’d like to acknowledge one who really can. He is Alan Rosenspan. Alan is a veteran copywriter and marketing strategist, who now runs his one marketing agency (www.alanrosenspan.com).

I recently stumbled upon his book, Confessions of a Control Freak. It’s 324 pages consist of bite sized cases and highly actionable examples across many markets. The title refers to control, as in comparing new programs and promotions with a prior performance benchmark. The goal is to appropriately measure outcome and beat the control.

The book’s perspective is direct mail. His cases and advice, especially in copy and offer development, translate easily into on-line media and integrated programs. No Olympian perspective here, the advice is concrete and specific. I found it definitely a good read. You can find more it at alanrosenspan.com/control_freak.html

Super Bowl Redux

Super Bowl 2008 set records – most of them off the field. $ 2.7 million for 30 seconds of air time was one; (estimated) “viewership” of 97.5 million was another.

Add production costs and that most advertisers ran more than one 30 second spot and this starts to involve real money. These costs don’t include extras such as “business travel” by senior management to the game, presumably to see how the commercials look on the large high definition monitors in their sky boxes.

Undoubtedly the Super Bowl delivers the largest mass audience of any domestic medium. Viewers are not restricted to youth, men, or even sports fans. For this event at least, advertisers can reach most of their market. Actually, none of the Super Bowl advertisers from Audi to GoDaddy to Budweiser to eTrade to Garmin sells to so broad a market. As with all mass media, marketers have to buy more exposure than they can use in an attempt to cover a market.

In addition, the Bowl ads have a following and life of their own. They are covered by business and news media and are replayed on sites such as YouTube. This secondary and sometimes even tertiary exposure is free.

What do they get for 3 or 5 or 10 $ million? It gets fuzzy here. For example, IAG Research ranked ads by most liked and most recalled. The implicit assumption is that better recall and higher preference for an ad lead to more effectiveness. If this means higher sales, of which they present no data, how much is a likability point worth?

The “research” seems to decline from there. Internet tracking firm ComScore asked 1139 respondents two questions:

1) Which of this year’s Super Bowl advertisers’ ads would you like to see again? (Select 3)

2) Which Super Bowl advertisers’ ads improved or damaged your impression of the brand in any way?

Notably, their research did not try to track purchase behavior.

More substantial data are available from web traffic measurement firm HitWise. It reports that of the 32 Bowl advertisers, 9 had traffic increases to their site of 25% or more compared with the previous day while 10 of the advertisers actually had decreased traffic. Comparisons with the day before the game are not the most relevant. A better comparison might have been with the final playoff game two weeks prior, but HitWise does not volunteer these data.

Of course, a visit to a web site is hardly equivalent to buying a product, especially one not sold online. Indeed most of the advertisers sell nothing online. If the Super Bowl ads were an exercise to drive web traffic, they start to look a bit pricy.

What we haven’t seen are Bowl advertisers specifying the incremental sales of these campaigns. In some cases they may not know. Their ads generally didn’t include trackable URLs, phone numbers, coupon codes, etc. An impartial observer might wonder if these advertisers did not really want their Bowl campaigns evaluated.

What the heck, those chips taste really crunchy in the Sky Box.

Hit ‘Em Where They Ain’t – Trying To Imitate An Entrenched Competitor Is Risky

A few years ago, I managed a field marketing program for one of the (at the time) major maker of MP3 players. The client, whom I’ll call Xco. was a multiproduct company known for computer accessories. It’s early music players had achieved some success, though they were a minor business for the company. These players were light, compact, relatively inexpensive, flash memory devices which used a replaceable standard AA battery.

That year the iPod was hot and it grew the category as it expanded its own business. The iPod featured an ability to hold a large collection of tunes made possible by a micro hard drive and came in an elegant polished metal case. It was the most expensive player, but it held the most tunes.

Xco and several competitors launched similar products – MP3 players with small hard drives. Xco’s product lacked the polished design of the iPod, but was serviceable and easy to use. To try to secure a beach head, Xco priced its players 10% to 15% below Apple’s. Not surprisingly, this wannabe product a – poor cousin at a slightly lower price – failed. Xco eventually exited entirely from the category.

There were a number of reasons for failure, but poor marketing strategy was significant. In effect, Xco tried to position itself as a parity product against the category leader with no positive differentiation except a small price discount. Since my research showed 80% to 90% of consumers preferred the look and feel of the iPod, the product was not perceived as competitive even at the lower price. Xco’s product was doomed.

What might Xco have done? Instead of trying to be an iPod, it could have built on the demonstrated market success of its initial products. Customers liked its solid state players, which were smaller, lighter and fit comfortably in the hand or pocket, in contrast to the bulkier and heavier iPod. Moreover, the ability to replace the battery with an inexpensive standard battery, satisfied a perceived need, which Apple still has not adequately addressed.

This compact light weight inexpensive player with replaceable batteries could effectively have positioned Xco against Apple given that Apple would have had no comparable product (with or without replaceable batteries) for two years. Thus with proper execution, Xco might have defended and grown its solid state player business.

This is not to predict that Xco could have indefinitely withstood Apple as it broadened its product line. At the least, that would have required continued innovation. But by avoiding a “me too” strategy, it would have likely earned a far better return on its business.

Extra Bases in Boston

Boston Baseball Fans and some normally indifferent to the game are even more enthusiastic leading up to the 2007 World Series. The reason – not just the Sox’ chance or a second title in three years – but furniture.

Those who bought sofas, dining room sets, etc. last spring at Jordan’s Furniture, a group of four retail stores near Boston, stand to have their full purchase price (up to $2,500) refunded if the Boston Red Sox win the World Series.

This promotion created news coverage at the time and thus amplified Jordan’s own marketing of the event. The press also reported that sales volume was substantially above the prior period and that during the last week of the event the store was “mobbed.” Jordan’s hedged their expense of the promotion through an insurance policy.

What does this have to do with the furniture business or yours? Why is Jordan’s so much more successful than most furniture retailers?

Sports relates sales promotions are common. But this one was unique. It was not a ho-hum official sponsor of, hire an endorsement from a particular sports figure, or buy and be entered in a drawing for World Series tickets.

A key question for any marketer is or ought to be what business are we in. For Jordan’s, the answer appears to be show business. The thought of dragging your family to look at mattresses, living room ensembles, and dining tables is not appealing. It becomes a chore to be avoided.

But if you could see first movies on a giant Imax screen, have free popcorn, and have a year-round Mardi Gras. In short be entertained and while your at get that desk and filing cabinet, you’ve been wanting for your home office. Going to Jordan’s during this promotion was participating in an event

Barry and Eliot, Jordans’ top executives and spokesmen, have long used entertainment to position their company as a venue as well as a furniture store.

All of this adds perceived value to what could seem like a boring commodity, encourages shoppers, and engages customers.

You don’t have to swing for the fences the way Jordan’s has, but what are you doing to get past first base with your customers?