Un-pimp your advertising
When I started this blog I knew I wanted to stay away from any commentary about specific ads or campaigns. I hear a lot of that in my day job, plus there’s lots of people who make that their specialty. But the single most discussed campaign right now is probably the new CP+B campaign for VW, and I can’t resist. It made big news when Kerri Martin and the rest of the team at VW dropped Arnold of Driver’s Wanted fame a few months back for Crispin. This campaign has been anticipated ever since by ad watchers waiting to see if this is the beast too big for even mighty CP+B to slay. Kerri and I worked together at BMW, and I knew the one thing she would do above all else was make sure Crispin had room to be Crispin. Which means of course, nothing safe, nothing sacred. So the predicatably freaky campaign for the new GTI showed up, and there’s been the typical weighing in on it.
But VW is the people’s car, after all. So what do the people have to say about it? Here are the top video views of the week on YouTube:
The number one video of the autistic basketball player is pretty unreal. Stop reading for a second and watch it (in a new browser window) if you haven’t already seen it. If you have, check out the next three videos. They’re all — that’s right — the new VW ads.
From a quick scan of it, there’s not another ad in the top 100 YouTube videos. By my math, VW has gotten 712,229 non-paid views of their advertising this week. And because the impressions generated online are fully intentional, with consumers seeking out this stuff, the comparison to paid TV impressions has to go through a correction factor to account for DVRs, channel flipping, multi-tasking, and bathroom breaks. Not to mention the additional word-of-mouth and enthusiasm advantage that fully intentional content has over randomly encountered content.
So what have we learned here?:
1) Online video sharing gives us a pretty cool advertising impact barometer.
2) Freaky, outrageous, outlandish content may seem inappropriate in a boardroom as marketing and agency execs talk about it. But your consumers might see things differently.
3) Nothing beats a great autistic basketball player story.
February 27, 2006 at 1:12 am
[...] Update: This new campaign is getting huge play on the internet. Thoughts from the experts… Ernie Schenck just a blip Left Lane News [...]
February 27, 2006 at 2:11 am
[...] Así es, la última campaña de Volkswagen para su nuevo modelo GTI, Un-pimp Your Ride, realmente está arrasando. Si revisan los videos más vistos la última semana en YouTube (sitio para compartir videos gratuitamente), se darán cuenta de que de que los tres comerciales realizadas para dicha campaña se encuentran en los lugares 2, 3 y 4 respectivamente. En el blog Just a Blip, sacaron la cuenta y resulta que con esto Volkswagen ha obtenido un total de 712,229 (y aumentando) pasadas de sus comerciales totalmente gratis. Adicionalmente hacen una observación muy importante, una vista en internet equivale a un usuario que buscó el comercial y por tanto lo vio completo y con interés, a diferencia con los comerciales que normalmente se transmiten en la televisión, donde no sabes con exactitud cuántos vieron tu comercial y menos si hubo un interés por verla. Sin duda que este fenómeno da para una reflexión más profunda del tema internet y más especificamente los blog, ya que sin lugar a dudas los blog se están transformando en una importantísima fuente de marketing “viral” muy valiosa. [...]
February 28, 2006 at 11:04 pm
[...] [via just a blip] [...]
March 25, 2006 at 4:17 am
Wow. The ads have drawn some 700,000-plus views. So, do we know who these people are? Are they at all near the demographic of the desired target audience? Are they fifteen-year-olds who don’t drive? How many of them have clicked on more than once? And, let’s not forget, that totals the viewership of less than one airing on a mediocre-rated television show.
Okay, so I think it’s great that the brand can gain free exposure. But I’m so, so, so tired of things like this being held up as proof the future of advertising is about to radically change. It’s like putting sprinkles on top of a donut then saying it’s the end of world hunger.
As much noise as they make, CP&B have had their fair share of failures and lost accounts. Loud, weird and noticeable can be successful. But they aren’t the definition of it. Let’s all just calm down and wait until a year’s sales numbers are in. Then we how smart this work might be.
…tom