Based on pure You Tube Views, Go Viral ranks the below five videos as the top-five viral commercials of 2007 (scroll down to see the actual videos). If you haven’t seen these, you need to watch every single one and consider how this type of activity could benefit your own brand or client.
1. Cadbury - Gorilla Drummer, launched online in August; agency: Fallon.
2. Smirnoff - Green Tea Partay, launched online in August; agency: JWT, New York.
3. Ray-Ban - Catch Sunglasses, launched online in May; agency, Cutwater.
4. Blendtec - Will it Blend? launched online in July.
5. Lynx/Axe – Bom chicka wah wah, launched online in May; agency BBH, Copenhagen.
What can we learn here? Why have these videos been so successful? What do they have in common?
Common themes I see in all of these:
1. 4 of the 5 videos don’t fit the “30 second spot” convention…they’re much longer and involved
2. All of the videos are fundamentally based on “entertainment” versus “branding”
3. All of these could be consumer generated in style, but we the viewer understand from the beginning that they’re not
4. For the most part, product integration isn’t 100% clear from the beginning…it’s a much more subtle approach
5. The brands here are not particularly sexy - a blender, deodorant and green tea - this is pure creative to make this interesting to the customer
Finally…let’s see the videos!
A recent article in B2B points us to the Top 10 Marketing Trends for 2008.
Naturally, I was drawn to those that related to media buying:
- Budgets shift to online
- The customer’s in control
- Embracing web 2.0
- Targeted, personal events
- Integrating media platforms
- Going mobile
Although these aren’t exactly groundbreaking, it’s pretty interesting to see how these trends meld with the Balihoo strategy and solution. Advertisers need to make strategic media buying decisions as online opportunities continue to grow, but still maintaining a presence with events, trade shows, and niche conferences, in addition to the traditional channels that are still reaching potential customers where they want to be reached. It’s not rocket science (quite yet) but you can be that it will require new tools and new ways of thinking by media agencies to react to these trends and fill their customers needs.
Reading Marketing Charts, a fairly new site that I’ve ran across recently that actually has some pretty great information for media buyers. Check it out when you get a chance, but in the mean time I have to pull out a quote from their post entitled Vertical Search an Advertising, Revenue Opportunity for Online Publishers:
“Some 93% of media and internet professionals say they would be very likely or quite likely to use a search engine that focused on serving their specific business or work needs, according to “Vertical Search Report 2008,” a B2B survey of more than 500 media and internet professionals.”
We know! That’s one of the reasons we’re building Balihoo! Although Balihoo has a lot of great features that go well beyond basic search (campaign management, RFP/RFI, content sharing) basic media search was actually the genesis of Balihoo. In fact, you can sign up now to get a free Balihoo Basic account to access our search engine!
Some of these are just too good to pass up:
Advertising on police cars: http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/11/30/for_cruisers_an_ad_on/ . We’ve all been in a situation where the editorial and advertising staffs can’t help but intermingle and impact one another…wonder what happens here?
Hyper-local bathroom ads for small and big business. (of course, the company name is MizPee!)
High-Definition Napkins
Want to get crazier? How about ads on:
You might get a lot of notice for using a unique technology/approach (high-def napkins) or ad placement (bathrooms), but you want to make sure it fits your brand - and that the uniqueness doesn’t become the sole focal point rather than your ad and message. Also…really think before you head down this route. Are you doing this simply for the shock value? Can you use a tool like Balihoo to find better, more targeted places to extend your message? Before you know it, you may be placing ads on kids’ report cards.
I was browsing media buying articles on ClickZ this morning when I came across the following by Fred Aun: “2008 Outlook: No Sign of a Cool Down in Local Online Ads” (http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3627828). I immediately thought that this might be interesting to the community of Balihoo users – both buyers and sellers.
Aun writes, “Bolstered by the popularity of search, directory and inexpensive video, local online advertising should grow by about 50 percent and become a nearly $13 billion industry by the end of next year, according to a new study.” This growth is fueled by the online local advertising demands of job recruitment, hospitals, dot-com businesses, auto marketing, and credit/mortgage services.
As Aun explains however, it is the companies who have dedicated Internet advertising representatives that are faring the best with this new surge. And what’s more, studies show that “Internet companies with no local presence ‘pulled ahead’ of local, traditional media in 2007 in terms of capturing local online advertising.”
That’s where Balihoo comes in. One of Balihoo’s strength is the ability to drill down into particular mediums and geographic area using the “Advanced Search” feature. For instance, running a search for all Online mediums in the Austin DMA returns results including the websites of local newspapers, radio stations, the Burnt Orange Nation blog (Go Horns!), and of course Google’s regional targeting capability.
Media Buyers: Balihoo’s search tools are free to use with a “Balihoo Basic” account and can help you target local online opportunities for your clients. Sign up to receive a Balihoo account at: http://app.balihoo.com/FrontEnd/Register.aspx
Media Sellers: Listing and maintaining your information in Balihoo is free! And if the trends are correct, if you have an Internet sales representative it’s important their contact information is accessible to interested buyers . Sign up at http://app.balihoo.com/FrontEnd/Register.aspx for a free Balihoo account and take control of the local advertising sales in your market!
As 2007 begins to wind down, the Balihoo product team continues to move forward with new features and tools to make media buying and planning more efficient!
Continued development of Buyer Search and Discovery Tools
- Many products such as TV stations use counties to define their coverage area, so Balihoo has added counties to help better define product coverage. Now coverage can be defined at virtually any level including State, DMA, County, City, or Zip. This helps owners better articulate their coverage area and also enhances a buyer’s ability to find the coverage area they need for their campaign.
- Advanced Demographic Profiling is now available! Within each demographic category (e.g. Age), correlations can be set for each subgroup within that category instead of just selecting the best subgroup for that category. This helps owners give a full picture of their product demographic coverages and helps buyers search and find better products to meet the demographic needs of their campaign.
Buyer Campaign Management: Balihoo is beginning to make the media campaign the centerpiece of the application experience. This started with some enhancements this past month that include:
- Campaign Console which becomes the central hub of activity to manage all aspects of a media buying campaign
- Enhanced features for pruning and manage your consideration set
- Campaign document management to keep all your key documents and deliverables in one place
- Notes management, which allows you to start conversation threads on the campaign itself or even about individual products within the campaign.
And all of this is walled off to just the users within your organization!
Owner Product Promotions: In addition to our free media property listing service, there are new features that allow publishers to enhance their product listings, which will help drive traffic to a possible sale. Balihoo is also offering an analytics feature that allows publishers to get an idea of traffic on their products within the Balihoo application.
Many thanks to Hollis Thomases and all the folks over at ClickZ for the great article on Balihoo that launched today entitled, “A Media Planning Solution for a Fragmented World.” One of my favorite quotes:
“All of these features are free to use in Balihoo’s “Basic” version, which alone will make Balihoo a media professional’s best friend. Personally, though, I feel the real power of Balihoo lies in what you can do beyond just finding media properties. With the paid “Pro” version, the user can really harness Balihoo’s power and improve media planning process efficiencies.”
Another favorite, “Balihoo also has an in-house 20-person media research team. For no additional charge and so you don’t waste time making inappropriate inquiries, this team will assist you in obtaining information on media for which Balihoo has incomplete information. These same people monitor responses from media owners and for those who don’t respond within an acceptable time frame, a Balihoo representative will do the follow-up. Think of them as your own personal naggers.”
And, finally, the last line of the article, “…I think with Balihoo, a new day’s dawning in media planning and buying.”
In an industry that accepts waste as simply a cost of doing business, we can sometimes forget that there really are better ways to do things.
Coming from the outside into the media and marketing industry I can tell you that I am constantly amazed at the lack of efficiency that exists in such a massive industry. We are fortunate at Balihoo to be working with some of the best minds in the industry. Advertisers, agencies, and media owners, from the largest multi-nationals to very small operations that are all interested in disregarding the status quo and actually progressing the industry forward with open minds and a simple desire to improve the performance of marketing dollars through efficiency of process and effectiveness of good strategy.
Quite a few economists are predicting a slowdown or recession in the economy, and we all know that if the economy slows down, the ad budgets follow quickly behind. Now is the time for marketers, their agencies, and the media owners, to work together to create a more efficient and effective means of doing business. Now is the time for the entrenched incumbents to shed the status quo as a means of doing business and embrace a more open and effective mode of operation. We have two customers in particular that are worthy of very high marks in this regard. One is a massive media agency and the other a very large publisher. They have both come to Balihoo because of the manner in which we have approached the market. They both see our platform as a means of creating new efficiencies in the process and as a means of helping to better serve those customers.
In the next few weeks I will post some additional thoughts about these two rouge thinkers and hopefully I can convince them to write a guest blog here to explain their thinking. Until then I will leave you with a quote from management pioneer Peter Drucker “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” I think the industry could use a little more of both.
Lots of stuff going on in the industry last week/this week that feel required to comment on, so I thought I would throw it into one all-encompassing post!
Let’s start with Facebook. 
Facebook announced that they’re going to revise their Beacon Advertising system as a result of mounting pressures around privacy, spearheaded by the group MoveOn.org. This demonstrates that consumers don’t react well when they feel they are being roped into marketing unknowingly. Viral and consumer-driven campaigns have been proven highly effective, but the key is to excite, incentivize and mobilize consumers -not to do it behind their backs. It’s good to see that more opt-in features and transparency is being added. Media buyers need to make sure they fully understand how these mechanisms work before they commit. Consumers who feel their privacy is being invaded will associate that experience with the brands being advertised.
Secondly, we have the writers strike and its potential impact on advertising media. I don’t know about you, but I’m already sick of the Jay Leno reruns from the mid-90’s. Regardless, I think this brings up a VERY interesting situation for the media buyer/planner. I think this really sets up the ability to have conversations with your client regarding using different media tools to reach the desired target audience. A drop in TV ratings opens the door for some very creative options around using more targeted messages to reach smaller markets via other vehicles. The successful media shops will view this as an opportunity (albeit with a lot of work) to expose their clients to the real “strategy” behind what they do. Take this opportunity to test messages and vehicles that the client otherwise might not have considered. 
Finally, Reuters discusses how a potential US economic recession could impact the media and advertising industries. Interestingly here, they specifically call out that media companies with significant presence would be the least impacted. This is certainly related to my recent post on the Internet Advertising Bubble. Clearly, the media owners (and planners/buyers) that are able and prepared to reach targeted groups of audiences with specific messages will still thrive, even in a downturn. Marketing and advertising will go on, we will just see significantly increased pressure to deliver results and ROI. Naturally, I strongly believe that using tool like Balihoo can help these organizations not only survive, but actually prosper through these times.
Did I miss anything? What’s happening in the industry that is important to you RIGHT NOW?
