So I was sent the new Old Spice ad.  It made me laugh.  It made me laugh a lot. LOL,  FTW and the rest.  The problem is it didn’t massively want me to buy Old Spice – it just made me laugh.  So, I thought I’d check out the old Old Spice ads – the ones I grew up with, and the ones that first embedded the brand in my conscious and firmly embedded a bottle of Old Spice on my father’s 80′s style dresser table.

And you know what, I think the old ads are better than the new ones.  And the reason is largely because not only did they make me laugh, but they also made me want to buy Old Spice – out of necessity, after all when a lovely lady in a film feeds you lines like “Old Spice, he sure knows what he’s doing” and then ends with the epic line “Girls like it.  Is there a better reason to wear Old Spice”.  Damn straight there isn’t.  I’m off like a shot to shock up . . .

The challenge of non-interuptive forms of modern / social advertising is to get that balance between entertainment and sell.  The sell in a viral, is largely now largely viewed downstream in the marketing funnel.  The trick is to look at how you can bring that conversion upstream a little something that I’m not sure New Spice gets 100% bang on . . .
New Spice

Old Spice

@Rubber_Republic

Everyone’s  done it.  Whether out of malice or light-hearted ribbing, everyone’s made fun of a ginger.  Or should I say GINGAAAAA.  A couple of weeks back, all this ginger-baiting got too much for one young (and disturbingly angry) American kid who decided to unleash his fury on YouTube by filming an anti-ginger-bashing diatribe in his back yard.

Cue massive YouTube hit and new internet meme.  That’s the “Gingers have souls” meme, with 100′s of YouTubers remixing and parodying our young ginger friend’s video rant to the tune of 3 million+ views.

The thing that fascinates me most is the sheer scale of remixing and “replying” as well as how this meme’s spread so quickly.  And the answer to this seems to lie in a mixture of the film’s subject matter – “life as a persecuted ginger” -  and its execution – a mixture of LOL and WTF.  The fact that everyone knows a Ginger in their email address-book, and that the film is genuinely disturbing/amusing in equal doses, means that it has a defined relevant well-connected community and reasons to share within the community – the two key ingredients to creating true virality. 

My favourite – the Dubstep remix

This is possibly the ultimate in accidental virals.  So the story goes – nice Hampshire Centre Parks wanna-be holiday resort “Sandy Balls” decides they want to advertise their wares on TV.  They get a local agency to create their ad – pitched (no doubt) as a mix-between Baz Luhrmann’s Australia and the Sound of Music.  The CEO of Sandy Balls takes the bait and goes for the treatment.  It’s what he’s always wanted – TV fame at last for his beloved holiday park.

Several thousands of pounds (and takes) later, local ad agency delivers a beauty of a film.  Overwhelmed by the Luhrmann-esque results, the Sandy Balls’ PR agency pitches to “seed” the film on YouTube and make Sandy Balls “famous”.  And they do.  On Failblog.  In America.   Amongst 15 yearolds (and me) who find the name Sandy Balls delivered in clipped English tones so fricking hilarious they send it to their whole address book racking up 10′s of thousands of YouTube views . . .

And you know what, I love it.  It’s a truly great piece of work, and having enjoyed it on the small (laptop) screen can’t wait to enjoy the simple pleasures of Sandy Balls for myself . . .

@Rubber_Republic

So following on from my obsession with models (the graph not busty/leggy type) I’ve drawn up what a typical viral campaign looks like.

And the truth is your typical viral looks a bit like a roller-coaster.  Starting with a sharp climb as the campaign launches and the early-adopters starting buzzing-up the campaign, we then reach a plateau with numbers hitting a constant for a while until we see the campaign peak and then WHOOOOSH! the campaign enters its long-tail stage zooming downwards, with numbers slowly (or rapidly) decreasing over-time.

Of course, the better the viral the bigger and more extensive the long-tail of the campaign, which I’d argue is where much of the value of viral campaign lies . . .

@Rubber_Republic

Bloody hell, a month goes by, and China and Google
split up. That particular debate centres on how
national governments interfere with cyber communities for their own,
possibly nefarious, ends. Not new, and we should pay attention to it here. Censorship is creeping
back in many Western countries as well as being sort of expected in
what we rudely describe as the ‘less democratic’ world.

One output from the Digital Britain report published in the
summer is the formation of bills to go through parliament to address
the issues of copyright, open access, digital inclusion and so on, that a
digitally literate economy needs to get right. In the first and possibly last effort before the election, not everyone thinks that the government has got it right.  Here’s Cory Doctorow on boingboing describing the assault on freedom that locking down your ISP account presents. And here’s Rebecca McKinnon in the Guardian
touching upon the French efforts to reject the Satan of Music
Downloading, in the context of Google’s legal battles with China,
France, Italy, etc. Mind you, Johnny Halliday isn’t exactly going to be
troubling my MP3 collection in the near future, but I’m lucky to live
in a country where you can say stuff like that and you aren’t marked
down by the authorities as a travel risk.

Good news today – the government is tabling a series of amendments that appear to curtail the most iniquitous clauses in the bill, including the one that gives a (currently unelected) minister
the right to decide on who and how to crack down on copyright
infringement without recourse to any other parliamentary process.
Whether they do or not remains to be seen.

What’s this got to do with marketing? The dripping irony here is
that in the world of brand communication, we’re almost desperate for
consumers to download our brand content for free and share it with each
other. We want our viral messages to go viral, and for our amateur
enthusiasts to make their own versions of our slick commercials. We
want to show that consumers care enough about the brand to bother.
Which makes it surprising (to me, anyway) that there weren’t more
agency people involved in evaluating whether this new law is a blocker
to innovation. It’s not just about digital innovation, but innovation
in all forms of communication. At CES, the big consumer electronics show in Las Vegas,
most of the new technology devices being showcased have social
technologies built in to them. This means that people will be able to,
if they can be arsed, link to each other, recommend where they are,
tell people where they are going and where they’ve been through pretty
much any device. If you think of Twitter as “what are you doing?” think
of the next wave of social tech as “Where are you?” Hmm.

And this brings me back to the slow post movement recently on brand republic, and the kind comments I’ve received on Twitter and
Facebook about the past month’s abstinence. Mad busy, that’s all I can say. And will be at the weekend too no
doubt. Plus ca change

Follow me on Twitter, if you cba. 

 Some things are just plain clever (interesting) and beautiful.  And this is one of them.  He’s a formula: clever + beautiful = I WANT TO SHARE!

 Not enough things online are beautiful . . .

Hot on the heels of the infamous Gorilla and Trucks campaigns; Cadbury
are giving you access to the Chocolate Dream Steam Machine and the
opportunity to choose from a range of sweet, fruity, rich, nutty,
subtle, and downright ludicrous flavours to mix into your very own
personalised bar of Dairy Milk.

For most kids (and grown-ups) this is a dream come true. 

From a marketing perspective I hope Cadbury deliver on their promises on this campaign – unlike their previous campaign for the Natural Confectionery Company – which promised free sweets for signing up to their launch campaign.  2 months later – me and whole host of friends who signed up to the campaign have yet to receive our sweets . . . and nor have we bought any either.

There was a time I loved Jamie Oliver.  Then I hated him.  Now I’m loving him again.  I’m loving him because he’s invented “viral food”.  This is Jamie’s idea of spreading recipes around Rotherham by getting people to “passing on” recipes to friends.

In the first programme Jamie boldly laid out his plans by drawing out his his nice viral food theory in which within 10 turns of “passing on” all 200,000 people across Rotherham would have been reached.  Simple.

Or not so simple as it turned out in practice.  As a viral theory geek it was clear why his theory isn’t working as well (or simply) as he first thought.  These are:

- Make it simple to engage with: Jamie’s recipes are too complicated to get to grips with and pass on.  The first 2 recipes that he tried to get people to pass on were meat balls and salmon.  Meatballs may sound simple – in practice they’re a pig to make and easily fall apart.  Spag Bol would have been a much simpler option.

- Make it simple to pass it on: Worse than a complex idea, is bad execution of the “viral agent” itself.  In this case the viral agent was a recipe card – or in fact a piece of paper with a badly laid out recipe on it (as one of the Rotherhamites pointed out!)  A Sainsbury recipe card kinda format would have been much better.  Nicely compact and easy to pass on . . .

- Target influencers: First off Jamie’s approach to finding people to “pass it on” was to cast his net wide for anyone at all to create the viral effect – which largely consisted of socially awkward single mothers.  Rather than picking at random, a clever approach would have been to pick community influencers – e.g. pub staff, cornershop workers etc.  People who are connected and likely to more easily create his ideal food viral.

If anyone’s forgotten how amazing local radio is – check this.  Is true local radio viral gold dust . . .

 http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/when-hardeep-met-les
 

I’m starting a campaign to get Les Ross on national radio.  Think he’d be a perfect replacement for Jonathan Ross (no relation) on Radio 2′s Saturday morning slot . . . 

Following on from my blog posts from a few weeks back re: ingredients for virality, here’s another stab:

Funny animation + free sweets offer = viral

See the results here:

www.naturalconfectionery.co.uk/

I think this is a blinding little opening campaign for a new sweet brand.  It intrigued me, it made me laugh, it made me click and then it made me give away my personal details.  Genius.

Well, nearly genius.   I didn’t actually sign up in the end, as I spotted in the small print that rather than being a quaint indy company (the kind I love to back and shop at), it was actually a Cadbury sub-brand.  i.e. Natural Confectionery was Goliath not David.

This of course is no fault of the bigger campaign creative, however maybe they could have dealt with the Cadbury corporate thing a little bit better.  I know this is a super small detail, however it’s details like this that split the Cadbury’s from the Innocent’s . . .