Lessons of the ‘Shankapotamus.’
Here’s a scene that plays out over and over on a regular basis in living rooms across America. The specifics may change, but the overall dynamics are pretty consistent.
You’re sitting there with family or friends watching football or ‘Dancing With the Stars’ (or my favorite, ‘Mad Men’) on TV. Suddenly, a commercial spot comes on that you find entertaining (let’s use the “Shankapotamus” spot for E*Trade with the lip syncing baby as an example).
You get to talking about the spot, laughing about it, and decide to see if you can find it online. So you whip out your laptop, call up your favorite video site and view the spot a couple more times with your friends gathered around. You might look at other spots in the campaign, some long-form video on the ‘Making of Shankapotamus’ and maybe some viewer-created mash-ups of the spot. Then you decide, hey, your brother in Eugene might get a kick out of the spot, so you email the link to him.
So essentially, the creation and placement of a single 30-second spot resulted in way more views, way more engagement, and way more eyeballs than you have a right to expect from a TV spot alone. Part of this is due to the tools of Social Media—the ease at which it is to find, view and forward content. Part of it as well is due to the fact that the brand or its agency had the forethought to re-purpose the content online. But the “igniter” in this case was the creative itself. Without the content being fun and engaging, the search never would have happened in the first place.
Great creative has a life well beyond its intended medium. Create content and ads that people like and find entertaining, and suddenly you have an exponentially larger audience for your efforts. With unique video searches on YouTube at 88 million per month and growing, you get a sense of how large this potential “after market” of ideas is. Branded commercial queries are now the fastest growing category on video search.
The moral of this tale is that there has never been a greater business reason to demand break-through, viral-worthy content. Marketers who stick to the old ‘tried-and-true’ solutions that communicated clearly but offered the view little in the way of entertainment value (however you wish to define it) flat-out will not have the success in Social Media that marketers who continually create ‘talked about’ spots will have.
More than 40 years ago, famed adman Howard Gossage made the observation that, “People don’t pay attention to advertising. They pay attention to what interests them, and sometimes it happens to be advertising.” These days people not only pay attention to great content, they move it forward.
Posted by Mickey
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Recent Comments