don't freak out

A nice ad for Canal+ that pretty much says it all.

When people can just change the channel by thinking about it due to their new TVoIP system with brainwave control functionality no-one’s going to watch any ads. Which will be a great thing in lots of ways but there’s valuable dollars in advertising that ultimately come back to fund good content between said ads. They are a crucial enabler of the content that we want to see.

I’m down with associative campaigns. Is there some other ad buzz word for this that I don’t know about? Perhaps its just program sponsorship? Anyway, commercials that are not about the products themselves but valuable pieces of video content or even a show that the company can support and shout about and bask in their reflected glow. “This show proudly brought to you by…” is nothing new but stronger, more direct relationships between the advertiser and the content creators are evolving where the companies can virtually become enablers or patrons of the idea, such as with TED. I use TED as an example as I’m only really talking about the web. Actual TV is rapidly fading into the background here.

All this has been happening for a while, with such things as BMW funding the Italian Job remake to promote the Mini but the point is that it seems to be more necessary to think of marketing in these terms as everyone switches off the traditional channels.

Sure everyone has different tastes, but it’s the spirit of thing that matters – perhaps we need to make it worth watching, or expect it to be ignored.

Is the VW Fun Theory campaign where it’s at? Yesterday I met a woman who works for the agency responsible for the campaign, and when I mentioned it her response was “Yes it’s an amazing campaign. Brilliant.” The view figures are certainly impressive, and no doubt it is being regarded as successful by all involved.

Over 6.5 million views is not to be sneezed at. It certainly shows the content of the video, and the story being told is engaging people and, more importantly, motivating them to pass it on. It ticks all the right boxes for viral success – authenticity/truth, joy , OMG factor and unobtrusive branding. So successful viral video, yes. Campaign? Perhaps.

Firstly, two weeks and three or four views in, I went to the companion website and discovered an accompanying campaign competition. The URL is in the video title, but that’s about it, and until recently the video text was only in Swedish. Other than that there didn’t seem to be much direction to the site. Once there, the website is slow to load, clunkily put together and not really offering anything outside the videos on the front page. Clearly most people are not engaging with it either, given that on thefuntheory.com website the paino stairs video has 16 comments, and on YouTube it has almost 2700. Either that or the videos on YouTube had failed to adequately alert/encourage them to the website.

The competition itself seems fairly il-defined. According to the site, the top 10 will be decided by a jury, and then put on “public display in Stockholm” which really could be anything, including arguably just leaving them on the website and doing nothing additional with them. Clearly the campaign and the competition had been conceived as something for the Swedish market only, and when the videos went viral and truly international, outside of translating the video and the website to English there appears to have been very little done to ‘cross the chasm‘. €2500 isn’t particularly international prize money and a display in Stockholm will also only have limited appeal.

It remains to be seen what people come up with as entries for the competition, but at the point of writing there was only 20 entries there. Further, the uploading and display system presents the ideas in a messy stack of images and video, with page architecture that seems to be falling apart (http://thefuntheory.com/?q=entries). No one is commenting here either, so it will be interesting to see if people begin to engage with this component of the campaign as time progresses and more entries go up, and if they fix the website.

A great viral video that’s part of an online campaign for VW. I think it’s getting close to what effective online marketing/branding strategy can be. It is a story that exists outside of the brand involved, there’s no obtrusive product placement, and people watching it don’t feel sold to, or feel like they’re helping to sell something by passing it on, both very important factors in viral success. Most marketeers find it difficult to work with the truism that nobody in the blogosphere wants to help them sell anything. It is the realm of brand association which involves a certain amount of surrendering of control. Faking it just doesn’t cut it, whether its a simple vlog about a forgotten jacket or an elaborate hoax about a stolen racing car, bullshitting people is a ride on a bad media roller coaster – a brief rush and modicum of titillation followed by a nausea that will mean they never ride your stupid ride again. Ie: bad strategy. Thumbs up to VW.