By
Mary Boyle, Montana State Fund and Bruce Christian, SCF Arizona
Anyone in advertising will tell
you they're always looking for a new angle, a new way to get
consumers' attention. The clever, often goofy elements of viral
marketing take what used to be "water-cooler conversation"
to new depth through use of delivery models such as e-mail and You
Tube.
Blendtec
is a prime example of this phenomenon. A low-budget one-off video
depicting the company founder blending such unlikely objects as
iPods and broomsticks turned into an ad campaign that not only sent
sales skyrocketing, but made their marketing technique fodder for
companies looking to freshen their ad approach.
Since
the beginning of Blendtec’s ‘Will It Blend’ campaign, company
reps have visited small groups such as AASCIF’s Communications
Conference, on up to huge trade gatherings, like the scheduled
appearance at Ragan Communications’ annual Las Vegas blowout in
March.
Admittedly,
workers’ comp insurance doesn’t have the same quirky appeal as
blenders gone wild, but SCF Arizona has taken a page from the viral
book by placing its TV ads on the SCF YouTube channel, creating a
Facebook page for SCF Arizona (become a fan!) that also links back
to the main website and the YouTube channel, and we’ll be
launching e-mail campaigns this spring.
It’s
all about giving customers different ways to access information, and
on our end it’s about using every channel open to us, whether
it’s unconventional or tried-and-true.
Wikis, blogs, twitters, social networking, viral and social marketing,
branding. The amount of buzz words and trends in marketing these
days can be overwhelming.
But last spring Montana State Fund overcame our fear of “buzz
words” and dipped our toe into the pool of viral marketing. Our
target was young workers ages 16-24 years old. We wanted to
broadcast a message of safety, but we knew that this demographic
wouldn’t get it if we used traditional print, radio and TV
advertising. No, we had to create content they would enjoy and
actually find.
With that in mind, we produced four viral videos that riffed on
MTV’s popular Jackass series.
We seeded the videos on YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook, and
CollegeHumor.com. The tag for each of these videos was
“Don’t be a jackass at work”. At the end of each video,
viewers were invited to view it again, share it with a friend or go
to the newly created No Jack micro website www.nojack.net.
To
direct traffic to the site, we placed animated banner ads to target
markets on Google and Yahoo ad networks. In addition, we held an
online sweepstakes to win one of four Nintendo Wii game stations.
We
can’t say there wasn’t some trepidation about the campaign
within our baby boom executive team. But once they realized they
weren’t the target audience, and the campaign was well received,
they we relieved.
In all, nearly a thousand young Montanans entered to win a Wii;
stories on the campaign ran statewide in newspapers and on TV and
radio, earning more than $35,000 in public relations value; and the
online buy made more than 12.2 million impressions on our target
audience. Perhaps most impressive, Montana State Fund received
several reports of employers and even high school teachers using the
site as an educational tool for young workers.
|
