Beaker singing “Ode to Joy” is not a redub or reedit of old episodes of “The Muppet Show.” It’s one part of original web content featuring various characters from “The Muppet Show” created and produced by the Henson Company. Some of them include “Classical Chicken” with Gonzo, and “Rolling with the Skateboarding Dog” with Rowlf the Dog. What I find unique about the clips is that they update the Muppets to the digital age while retaining the character of Muppets as they have been since the ‘70s. The “Rolling with the Skateboarding Dog” has Rowlf with the skateboarding viral video bulldog and trying to do his own trick. At the end of some of the Muppet clips, we see Waldorf and Stadler peering into their own “web cam” criticizing the clips (W: How many hits did that receive? S: Unfortunately not enough to kill it.). Much the same way “The Muppet Show” parodied, as well as celebrated, the form of the variety show, these web clips use the viral form for as much of the comedy as well as the delivery of the message. In that sense, it is self-referential and thus keeps the brand name and brand quality intact.

On top of this, the advantages to posting it as a YouTube video have clear benefits to the company. When I showed it to my daughter, she wanted to see some of the other Muppet “boxes” (which is what she calls them). Each link led to another, including those clips, redubs and reedits of “Muppet Show” episodes. She loved a bunch of the clips of the show itself and it brought back fond memories for me. Because of that I was looking on Ebay pricing DVD packages of the first and/or second seasons of the “Muppet Show” to buy for my daughter. Now, this seed alone of  “Ode to Joy” received 4.5 million hits. Suppose that only 10% of those start to do what I did and look up the Season One DVD of the “Muppet Show” and 10% of that 10% decide to buy the DVD set– roughly 1% of those who saw the clip. That would be still 45,000 units of Season One “Muppet Show” DVDs sold. Even at the Amazon.com rate of $33.99, that means over $1.5 million in revenue for the company ($1,529,550). If they shopped around and got a deal at $23, that’s still $1 million and change for the company ($1,035,000). That’s mostly revenue for pushing existing stock of inventory for one season of DVDs. Even if the cost of one of the viral videos is close to $100,000 or more, the cost to profit ratio easily justifies the expense of the video. Take those numbers and extrapolate them across all other instances of the video and other videos (mentioned above) and we have a serious needle-mover.

Even if it didn’t lead to a sale, it leads to more recognition of the existing brand and continues the legacy of the show and company to a new generation, which is often immeasurable. Separating the quality product from the inferior is essential for any company, especially for children’s programming. Using the online community resources to help plug your product can mean the difference between not only profit and loss, but between obscure fad and sustainable memory that can survive generation gaps.

I have absolutely no doubt that my children (hypothetical in this case…I don’t have kids yet) will learn that Barrack Obama was “the internet President.” Like Kennedy was with television, Obama is with the web. The internet is the defining communications medium of our time, and the skill with which President Obama has embraced it absolutely dwarfs that of any other politician I am aware of.

I have developed a fascination with our new Commander-in-Chief’s use of the digital realm. Last week, I wrote about the White House website rollover, and since then I have been closely following new White House presences online. One of my favorite finds is the White House YouTube channel, where the masses can have instance access to President Obama’s weekly video address, and a slew of other content like Vice President Biden’s new video. For anyone who’s interested, the TubeMogul blog has some cool demographic stats on the White House channel.

Evidently the Obama Administration isn’t stopping its video distribution strategy with just YouTube. Social Media Playground pointed out that the White House also has a channel on Vimeo. Now the White House just needs to get a Twitter account and they’ll be running on all Web 2.0 cylinders. (Note: the twitter account @thewhitehouse is not official.)

I suppose the real question here is what all this social media will amount to. We already know that the Obama Campaign all but revolutionized use of the internet for campaign fund raising, but it is far too early to know whether the Obama Administration can that tech savvy to revolutionize governing. It seems to me that in a democracy “of the people, by the people, and for the people” any system whereby there is a more immediate connection between the electorate and elected officials is a positive thing. Will President Obama’s White House 2.0 be that conduit of the democratic promise? In this question each and every one of us has a say. We, as citizens, must choose to use these new information channels for them to amount to anything. If President Obama is leading the charge towards a more connected democracy, success will only be reached if we follow.

Imagine you’re a marketing and media manager of a popular television show with a loyal (dare I say ‘fanatical’) following. The fans of this show eagerly await each new piece of media you deign to drop their way the way a pack of hungry dogs awaits a dangling morsel. These are the fans that you see posting thousands of posts on the show’s official boards and traveling thousands of miles to score a single autograph: saying they’re “engaged” doesn’t even begin to capture the level of loyalty they possess that is just waiting for confirmation and recognition.

Imagine now all of the amazing things you, as a savvy marketer, could accomplish with these loyal fans on your side. Whether you create a detailed, crowd-sourced, social network that persists between seasons; an army of user-generated videos on sites like YouTube, Metacafe and Break.com; or a word of mouth marketing effort to spread the show’s message virally, the options for marketing media powerfully over the long term are endless when you have such an congregation ready to preach the show’s evangel.

Now imagine one final scenario: you’re the person in charge of marketing with media’s most loyal fans. Imagine that, due to a shortsighted outlook, hasty decision or pressure from your superiors, you made a decision that backfired. A decision that, no matter how much you tried reverse, spin or explain, alienated a significant portion of these perfect evangelists. More specifically, imagine that you put a lot of investment and effort into giving your fans high quality, exclusive media to enjoy between seasons and something you did in the process not only turned away some of your fans, but also made it hard for the rest of your fans to access and experience this exclusive media.

This would be a terrible use of these loyal fans by our imaginary media marketing manager, no? If I were that manager, I would call up Monster.com and begin marketing my resume the very next day.

The reason I’ve taken you down this imagination rabbit hole for so long is to remove branding associations and other distractions from a very recent, real-life scenario from which I derived the above story. As an open and unrepentant (dare I say “fanatical”) Battlestar Galactica fan, it is particularly disappointing for me to say that this egregious error of marketing media was committed against me and my fellow BSG fans by the Sci-fi Channel.

After taking almost a year off in the middle of the final season of the show, the Sci-fi Channel released 20 BSG webisodes titled “The Face of the Enemy” designed to satiate the hunger for more BSG media and to combat the negative effect they had already caused with the needless hiatus (10 webisodes and 10 “enhanced” versions of the webisodes with writer commentary).

The webisodes clearly required a lot of care and investment as they are as intricate, emotional and CG-heavy as the series that spawned them. Totaling approximately 60 minutes of perfectly-crafted content, the webisodes were pitched as “a series of revelations you won’t see on the show”. This is the kind of content that makes a fan like myself go crazy and immediately begin the armchair quarterbacking that often goes with being a disciple of such a mysterious and multi-faceted show. In short, I’m the target audience for this type of content.

Enter the marketing error so egregious that it has spawned it’s own ‘media marketing fail’ blog post: marketing other media, before the desired media with pre-roll advertising. Nothing makes a loyal fan feel less important than having to watch the same 30-second trailer before each of the 20 four-minute webisodes. To remove the math from your day, that means watching 10 minutes worth of the same commercial in an hour. That’s watching the same commercial every four minutes for 20 iterations.

To put it another way: Would you have an anniversary ring made specifically for your wife/husband and require that they sang 30 seconds of the Barney the Dinosaur theme song before they put the ring on each day? If you’re answering ‘no’ (and for your spouse’s sake I hope you are), why would you create expensive, specialized, micro-targeted content, then impede the exact group you spent such care catering to from enjoying that content 110%?

Is the Sci-fi channel so in need of dollars that they can risk alienating the best fans of one of their two successful shows? Can anyone in any creative or marketing position justify taking that risk?

This is indicative of a larger issue that I touched last year at the bottom of a post with a seemingly irrelevant title: Viral Marketing in the Fabric Industry? Then, the idea was crystalized as “pre-roll ads are dead”. Now I’m expanding the conclusion to “marketing media by interrupting other (desired) media is dying.” It’s not elegant, but it’s a point that needs to be made.

In an on-demand platform (the internet), if I’m trying to watch something specific and have to sit through other media first (irrelevant media of your choosing), you’ve already lost me. If you have the audacity to make me watch the same piece of media over and over before the media I’m looking for, I don’t care how awesome your content is purported to be, I’ll pass or wait and find that content elsewhere.

Not only is this marketing tactic offensive to your best customers, it’s lazy. “Cram more advertisements in” shouldn’t pass the wise marketing decision bar anymore. The internet has evolved passed its first iteration and now has sufficient variability to allow for brain cells to be expended in the form of creativity when attempting to win the business of your fans.

Or as Seth Godin puts it to Verizon in regards to Verizon’s mobile advertising strategy in late 2006, “Do you really want to alienate millions of users [fans] by giving us something we don’t need and don’t want?”

While nothing short of force majeure will stop me from watching the final episodes of BSG starting 1/16/09, nothing will get me to sit in front of Sci-fi’s botched effort to make a few extra bucks at the expense of their best fans. The sooner companies abandon this half-baked strategy of marketing media, the sooner they will be able to fully leverage their evangelists and completely monetize their content.

In this article, we will concentrate on the variables, which specify the popularity of a submission in YouTube.

The Peculiarity of YouTube

The viral potential of YouTube cannot be studied like the other popular social networks or blogs. YouTube is a combination of both.

• It encourages and promotes self-submitted content (other social networks are against self-submission)

• A YouTube channel should not update regularly to be successful (in comparison to blogs)

• It uses other social networks to increase popularity (like blogs do)

The studied videos, their submitters and their YouTube Network

We will study 3 of the most viewed videos of all time and 1 less popular for comparison. The videos are:

1. The evolution of dance, by judsonlaipply
2. Lo que tú Quieras Oír, by kaejane
3. Hahaha, by BlackOleg
4. Homenagem a Isabella Nardoni, by jeholiver011

Judsonlaipply is a YouTube member since March 23rd, 2006. He has submitted 2 videos and has viewed 859.
His channel has 23,432 subscribers and 1,130,903 views. He has 2,326 friends.

Kaejane is a member since 18th January, 2006. He has submitted 3 videos and has viewed 1,883.
His channel has 2,597 subscribers and a total of 151,191 views. He has 0 friends.

BlackOleg joined YouTube on November 01, 2006. He has submitted 6 videos and has viewed 25.
His channel has 3,560 subscribers and a total of 257,587 views. He has 287 friends.

Jeholiver011, joined YouTube on 2 April, 2008. He has sumbitted 1 video and has watched 10.
His channel has 228 subscribers and 11,737 views. He has 1 friend.

A first observation we can easily draw is that the number of friends does not play an important role in promoting a video. This is a very interesting conclusion, which goes beyond what we already know about social networks and the attention economy.

Kaejane has no friends and still his video is the 3rd most viewed of all-time. The same applies to Jeholiver011. His submission was top of the week and he just joined YouTube, having only one friend.

Popularity of the videos in other social networks

One of the main factors, that defines the success of a YouTube video is its submission in other social networks.

The evolution of dance got more than 2000 diggs and 200 stumbleupon reviews. It is natural since it got dugg by msaleem, one of the top Digg and SU users. It is no wonder it became so popular in YouTube.

Lo que tú Quieras Oír, on the other hand got only 2 stumbles and 2 diggs.

Hahaha, also did extremely well on other social networks. 62 reviews in StumbleUpon and 3536 diggs (again submitted by a top digger, MrBabyMan).

Jeholiver’s video had no luck in social networks.

The role of the popular social networks for the popularity of the YouTube videos is very clear. Would “Hahaha” and the “evolution of dance” have reached such view counts, if it weren’t for Digg and StumbleUpon?

Nonetheless the riddle remains: why the other videos became popular with such a low presence in social networks?

Conclusion and other variables which define YouTube popularity

Our observations so far suggest, that – in comparison to the other social networks we know – having friends on YouTube doesn’t necessarily mean popularity. Instead, having friends in other social networks can help promote the video.

But lets try to solve the riddle of the other videos, which became popular without being submitted in other social networks. What other factors can define the success of a YouTube video?

• demographics: the average age of the users, their location, their gender. We have for example two Spanish videos, which became popular without the assistance of any other social network. How big is the Spanish community in YouTube? Do they watch only Spanish videos?
• the interests of the average user: like other social networks, videoblog platforms concentrate on specific topics. Others on humor, others on animation/art, etc.
• the quality of the content: I think this is very important in YouTube. Thousands of people subscribe to a channel with just a couple of submissions (see judsonlaipply’s channel), with the hope to get some more quality flicks. Quantity is not important – YouTube users subscribe massively in channels – quality is.
• time of submission: this is a minor factor, but I believe it still plays a role. If you submit a video when the most users are offline, it will probably get lost in the archives.

I’m interested to see how you assess YouTube. What other factors could define the success of a YouTube video?

Theories differ as to what caused the event, but it’s clear that one really good thing came out of it: us. When all the big things died, it gave all the little things a much needed chance to get a foothold and start their own journey towards world domination. So what does this have to do with social media marketing? Everything.

The forms of “new media” and “new media marketing” with which this blog concerns itself are still exactly that: new. The vast majority of marketing and advertising dollars is still spent on mainstream, mass-media marketing. Even online marketing spending is still heavily weighted towards pay-per click, in-stream, and other traditional marketing methods shoved carelessly onto the digital world. “New media marketing,” is a small mammal in a world still run by dinosaurs. But that’s changing. We can see it happening all around us, and the topic has been discussed on this blog and others before. I write today specifically because I found two separate reports which, while not the harbinger of the traditional marketing apocalypse, certainly signal a shift in power that is already taking place.

Let’s begin with traditional off-line advertising:

In the results of an Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research study released today:

• 62% of marketers say traditional television advertising has become less effective in the past two years.
• More than 50% of advertisers said that when half of all TV households use DVRs, they will cut spending on TV advertising by 12%.
• 87% of respondents said they intend to spend more ad dollars on the Internet this year.

These stats are amazing. Over 60% of marketers are now admitting what we have all been feeling for some time: TV commercials just aren’t working like they used to. If half the advertisers say they will cut TV ad spending by 12% when DVR penetration reaches half of all households, then that’s somewhere upwards of 4 billion advertising dollars that will be looking for a new home. Couple that with the number of marketers who will be spending more ad dollars on the internet this year, and it becomes clear where those homeless billions are going to go when the time comes.

Now let’s look at online advertising.

This is the part where traditional online advertisers say, “Hey, what makes you think any of that money is going to be spent on new media campaigns?” It’s true that pay-per-click style advertising is still the largest subset of the online marketing industry. But, I would claim that these PPCers and pre-rollers and post-rollers are just as susceptible to the coming extinction as the dinosaurs of traditional marketing. All these PPC banner ads and rich media ads are simply the digital incarnation of the traditional marketing models of interruption and top-down thinking. I think people make the wrong distinction when they think that traditional marketing will die while internet marketing will thrive. That is drawing the line in the wrong place. It is traditional marketing models that will die, and new models that will thrive. A rich-media in-stream ad before an online video is not “new media marketing” simply because it is attached to online video. It’s still an interrupting nuisance that just shouts a message at me rather than conversing with me.

It is not just theoretical or ideological problems that these PPC marketing strategies must face, however. There are hard numbers that show one inherent problem with such marketing. That problem is click fraud, and ClickForensics has some new data out showing an increase in the already woefully-high click fraud numbers.

Look at these stats taken directly from the report:

• The overall industry average click fraud rate rose to 16.6 percent for Q4 2007. That’s up from the 14.2 percent click fraud rate for the same quarter in 2006 and 16.2 percent for Q3 2007.
• The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.3 percent in Q4 2007. That’s up from the 19.2 percent average click fraud rate for the same quarter in 2006 and 28.1 percent for Q3 2007.
• The 2007 industry average click fraud rate grew by 15 percent over the industry average click fraud rate for 2006.

I think click fraud is just the precursor to larger problems that will plague these forms of interruption-based online advertising over the coming years. The more I read, the more I study, and the more work I do with social and viral marketing, the more I deepen my conviction that the approach to marketing must change in order to reach consumers. You can no longer demand their attention, you must earn it. And if you have to earn their attention, then you have to engage them more than most marketers are used to. Marketing is becoming a conversation, not a sermon, and the rise of social media marketing is upon us.

For more on this topic, make sure to subscribe to our feed. Next week I will be publishing a follow up post entitled “The Rule of Reciprocity” that will discuss the importance of the “conversation” that must start taking place in order for marketers to continue to engage consumers.

TechnoratiTags: social media, social media marketing, marketing, online marketing, traditional marketing, online advertising, advertising, click fraud, new media

Introduced with a Super Bowl commercial, Tide’s newest social media effort takes the form of a destination website. The site, located at www.mytalkingstain.com, not only hosts the original commercial, but also provides visitors with the ability to create a customized stain and commercial.

The Scores:

1. Value to Consumer: 65
2. Engagement: 88
3. Creativity: 73
4. Ease of Use: 83
5. Viralness: 87
6. Forwards: 4
   

Category Drill-Down:

Value to Consumer: Anyone playing around on this site for more than three minutes will realize that the main value added to the consumer is entertainment value. Having spent 30 minutes on the site myself, I must say it is definitely more entertaining than I expected. Uploading my photo, recording my voice and sending the absurd result to a friend actually is fun. While, in the end, I learned nothing about life, love or even Tide, there was definitely entertainment value to be had.
Value to Consumer Score: 65

Engagement: Interestingly, My Talking Stain offers many levels of engagement. If you want to upload a photo and watch the commercial, you can do that for a quick bit of fun. If you want to record your voice, send the commercial to your friends and enter to win some prizes, you can. If you want to make your own talking stain vid, you can do that too. Simply choose your level and rock out. This is a great feature as many people aren’t interested in playing with all aspects of the site to write an accurate post about it. Some people only want to play a little bit and Tide clearly considered this. The brand is present, but not offensively so. The addition of My Talking Stain branded content for ringtones, MP3s and buddy icons allows Tide to engage consumers where the consumers choose to live rather than demanding the consumers come to them. This shows a nice understanding of the social media space.
Engagement Score: 88

Creativity: The idea of the talking stain is definitely amusing. Building a social media experience utilizing a pre-made commercial, a destination site, customizable sounds and faces is a great way to expand upon the commercial. However, the customization of the talking stain is basically one small technological step above Elf Yourself and could have been better.
Creativity Score: 73

Ease of Use: The site is very easy to navigate; your options are clearly defined upfront by the stains on the shirt. The site is very well made and it’s very easy to make yourself a spoof video. Calling in to record your voice does require having a phone around, but that isn’t too much to expect these days is it? I wish they streamlined the “get famous” section of the site more, but the “spoof toolkit” is a big step above the “make one and post it online” that I was expecting. I’d bet 99.999% of people visiting don’t even seriously consider making a video but every .001% convinced to engage further with your brand via making a video is a huge win. This is especially true when applied to the very large numbers of people aware of the site due to Superbowl exposure.
Ease of Use Score: 83

Viralness: The site provides various opportunities for sharing and spreading the video online. While the medium is inherently not as viral as a video, they’ve offset this by prompting people to create their own videos and by facilitating a quick upload to Youtube. I was prompted multiple times to share, all in non-offensive ways. I was pleasantly surprised that they included, prominently, an embed option for your custom-made commercial; most companies would overlook this move. The lack of social news/bookmarking sites (think digg/del.icio.us/etc) was the only big mistake I saw.
Viralness Score: 87

Conclusion:

From the composite score (80) we can determine that Tide’s ‘My Talking Stain’ website provides a very solid forum for users to engage their brand. While some areas could definitely be improved slightly, no one area carried the marketing effort. The combination of usability, viralness and the utilization of multiple consumer engagement points allows this social media marketing campaign to promote the brand very well.

BONUS: the video I made

Technorati Tags: Social Media, Business, Marketing, Advertising, Viral Marketing, Social Media Marketing

The scores will be presented as follows:

1. Value to Consumer: 1-100
2. Engagement: 1-100
3. Viralness: 1-100
4. Ease of Use: 1-100
5. Creativity: 1-100
6. Forwards: 0-Infinite

Composite Score: Calculated by adding the scores of sections 1-6 and dividing by 5.

Category explanations:

Value to Consumer: This category represents our belief that a successful viral or social media marketing efforts should bring actual value to the consumers that experience them. This value, as I’m defining it, is pretty open and can be anything from entertainment and interesting discussions, to information and helpful resources. Since an online consumer is not captive to the marketer in any way, the marketing effort needs to bring real value to the consumer’s life if the marketing effort has any hope of being watched, engaged with or passed along. This category’s score ranges from 1-100 (100 being the best possible score).

Engagement: This category represents the ability of the marketing piece to engage the consumer with the brand. More than just “time spent on site”, this metric takes into account how much the consumer actually gets to “play” with the brand behind the marketing effort. A video can be very engaging, but destination sites, games, and blogs have even more potential for drawing the users into the “world” of the brand. Campaigns that combine multiple “new media” elements can be more engaging still. This category’s score ranges from 1-100.

Viralness: This category measures the ease by which someone can share the marketing effort with their network and any incentives that they have to do so. Are consumers prompted to share the marketing piece via social networks, email or embed tags? Is it even possible for them to do so? An important factor when discussing the ROI of an online marketing effort will be the ability of the effort to disperse easily on its own and reach a significant number of consumers. This category’s score ranges from 1-100.

Ease of Use: This category represents the ease of use or user-friendliness of the marketing piece. Can people see/play/download/upload/etc what is necessary to make this piece engaging in a quick and effortless way? Marketing efforts that are too involved and require much work on the part of the consumer will not spread optimally. The more time or tech savvy required to successfully experience the marketing message, the smaller the group of consumers using it will be. This category’s score ranges from 1-100.

Creativity: This category is relatively self explanatory. Something has to earn the consumer’s attention and the more interesting and different the marketing effort, the more easily that attention can be earned. This category’s score ranges from 1-100.

Forwards: This is a more concrete, “the proof is in the pudding”, category that simply reports the number of times I, personally, forwarded the marketing piece before sitting down to write a blog post about it. I figured, rather than trying to come up with a more subjective measure, why not simply record the number of times I ACTUALLY forward the piece and weight that number significantly less in the overall calculation. This category, barely affecting the Composite Score, almost amounts to a “bonus” category and can only shade the final score slightly in one direction or another. This category’s score range begins at zero and could theoretically be as large as the amount of connections I have in my network at any given time.

Composite Score: This number represents the overall assigned score to the marketing effort as a whole. With the first five categories equally weighted and the final category (Forwards) weighted significantly less, the composite score provides an easy way to compare otherwise disparate marketing campaigns. The range of the composite score is theoretically infinite, but the score of the campaign should be considered as if it were on a 1-100 scale.

Our Reviews series will hopefully provide a platform for discussion about actual viral and social media efforts that are currently online. Acting as a bare-bones case study, our readers will be able to see not only how each marketing effort stacks up against other efforts, but also what factors go into creating a successful viral and social media campaign. After reviewing multiple campaigns, important trends, strategies and techniques will be discussed.

As always, email us directly or comment if you have questions, improvements or social media marketing campaigns that you’d like to see reviewed.

Pandemic Labs co-founder, Matthew Peters, was quoted extensively in an article in the January Issue of the Industrial Fabrics Association Review magazine (page 42, titled “Catch the Fever”). The article, offering a high-level view of Viral Marketing, is filled with helpful quotes from social media thought leader Beth Kanter and Blendtec Director of Marketing, George Wright. The piece provides a brief history of viral marketing along with some valuable commentary and is a great read for anyone looking to catch up with the past few years of viral marketing news.

It’s interesting to see how each industry individually takes to Viral Marketing. It’s particularly interesting that, if this article is anything to go by, the industrial fabric industry seems to be very open to this new form of advertising. In fact, this article makes obvious to me a ridiculous assumption I was secretly harboring about “older” industries. Having worked in tech companies throughout my career, I had unconsciously assumed that non-tech industries were colder to these new technologies. Specifically, I had assumed that the earlier adopters of these types of marketing would come from the tech sector. Clearly this is faulty logic once I actually spend two braincells on it, and this article serves me a slice of humble pie.

The article embraces not only the history of viral marketing success (all the way back to the original BMWFilms), it embraces that history without the usual push-back from more traditional marketing thinkers that demand traditional marketing ideas and metrics. This excites me personally as, something I view as, an “old industry” is embracing a new technology better than most tech companies I’m working with!

In a similar, ‘tech isn’t as forward thinking as you’d assume’, vein Matt and I attended a tech industry panel event the other night that had a relatively high-profile group of panelists. In the Q&A, someone from the crowd asked a question that caused, in my mind, a very telling and depressing series of events. The question was, “What is the future of pre-roll video advertising?”. The panel took turns attempting to answer this question and it was painful! The comments ranged from, how ‘a study’ showed that pre-roll ads longer than 15 seconds actually “did better” than shorter pre-roll ads, to, how companies are now able to target pre-roll ads “better”. The small knot of social media folks I was sitting with started muttering unhappily. Did NO one see that pre-roll ads are demanding something that can no longer be demanded online? Do any of the CEOs of these extremely successful tech companies see that consumers will NOT put up with pre-roll ads since the exact video they hoping to watch is probably available in 10 other places online with no ads at all? Finally, after much floundering from the rest of the panel, Mike from Polaris Venture Partners saved the day with his dead-on, one-sentence answer “Pre-roll is dead!”. To me, the success of online, interruption-based advertising isn’t even a question. Its days are already numbered.

To sit and watch powerful tech people, who theoretically have some power over the future of my technological experience, not grasp the engagement marketing/interruption marketing difference, is unsettling. Couple that experience with the full-on embracing of viral marketing by an industrial fabric industry trade publication and companies like ours suddenly feel like they might be barking up the wrong industry tree when offering our services heavily to the tech industry.

Whatever the implications to the industry as a whole, the Industrial Fabric Association’s viral marketing article is a great read for someone looking to catch up with some of high level points on viral marketing.

• According to an October 27, 2007 report by Nielson, DVR penetration has grown to 20.5% of households.
• A report released this month from ABI research says, “Almost four out of five TiVo customers and over 82 percent of service provider DVR customers said they skip all or most commercials.”

So if we put those two numbers together we get around 16% of households reporting that they skip “all or most” commercials. So the question now becomes, if advertisers are reaching 16% fewer consumers, are they paying 16% less for their ads? The answer: probably not. I bring this up because I think DVR proliferation is likely to continue in the years to come. When Nielson first began tracking DVR usage in January 2006, they reported DVR penetration at 8% of households. So it’s taken only about 20 months for DVR penetration to more than double. At this rate we could be looking at over one third of all households having DVRs by the end of 2009. This is fantastic news if you make DVRs, but disquieting news if you are continuing to pay the same amount (or even more) for your ad time.

Advertisers need to quickly realize that the “golden age” of TV advertising is coming to an end. I am not saying that TV isn’t still the dominant advertising format, but I think we are seeing evolutions in technology that are indicators of a coming shift. DVR proliferation will continue and that means fewer and fewer consumers will be seeing your really expensive spot during the first break of “Grey’s Anatomy.” In addition, the internet is becoming an increasingly popular source for entertainment, with nearly 60% of all internet users saying they watch online video, and new formats such as the webisode just now beginning to get off the ground.

I think it’s fair to say that we are headed for a world where the TV and the computer are no longer two separate devices, merely two functions of a single machine. With computer monitors looking more like televisions, and the interface of your Comcast digital cable looking more like an operating system, we are already moving towards that reality. Think about it, you can already get your TV, cable internet, and phone piped in over one wire…is my vision really that much of a stretch? If an advertiser hopes to remain ahead of the game, it is not enough for that advertiser to simply acknowledge the coming changes. Smart advertisers will begin to act on these changes, leaving those who refuse to utilize these new tools in the dust. Online video, social media, viral games, destination websites, even virtual worlds all present marketers and advertisers with ways to not only advertise to consumers, but to engage them. Advertisers need to move away from a theory of interruption and embrace a theory of facilitation in order to remain successful. Luckily for advertisers, the tools are already here and new ones are evolving all the time.

What remains clear is that companies and brands cannot afford to sit idle while the ROI of their TV ad dollars dwindles. An unwillingness to leave their comfort zone is not an acceptable reason for your marketing agency to refuse to add social media elements to your integrated marketing efforts. Once again, I am not claiming that these new online marketing services are replacing more traditional marketing formats, but they are absolutely a necessary element to an overall marketing strategy for any company that wants to engage their customers directly. Moving outside the box is the best way to see the world for what it is, and to those skeptics that are afraid to take a risk I say: you can’t surf on the back of a wave.

Early next year, Ritz-Carlton will release a series of three short web films showing young, wealthy people enjoying themselves at the Ritz in ways that will help break down the stereotypes of the Ritz as being old and formal, while at the same time reinforcing that the Ritz is at the top of the game in both service and luxury. The films will be presented on the company’s website, but Ritz will use a bevy of tools to promote them. According to the Wall Street Journal, trailers will be posted on sites such as YouTube and Yahoo and there will be film screenings in cities like New York and L.A. At this point I can’t help but be reminded of the BMW Films: Shorts films, internet distribution, featuring a product in an unexpected way, and mainstream media promotion as a catalyst for the online viral process. The Ritz films are supposed to be entertaining, with small plots and young actors showcasing the ‘new side’ of the Ritz.

The interesting thing is that the powers that be at Ritz-Carlton feel that there is a risk of alienating the hotel’s older, traditional customer base. But, I think that concern is ridiculous (hence the title of this post!) Supposedly, the average age of a Ritz guest is about 46. According to the PEW Internet & American Life Project, only about 50% of people that age watch online video. I would venture to say that older (than 46) patrons are the one’s that the Ritz is most worried about offending, but in reality, the older a hotel patron is, the less likely they are to watch online video, so it is not very likely to have a negative effect.

In reality, I suppose it is not quite correct to refer to this move by the Ritz as viral marketing. The films are supposed to range from 4-10 minutes in length and that puts them at the long end of videos that go viral. Depending on who you talk to, viral videos should be no longer than thirty seconds to three minutes. The subject matter of the films is also a concern. They are not exactly supposed to be laugh-out-loud funny, action-packed, or mind-bendingly amazing (for plot synopses, see the 11/30/2007 WSJ article by Tamara Audi). My final concern is that Ritz-Carlton seems to be neglecting the potential power of a more comprehensive use of the social media universe. Sure, they are planning on using a couple big video sites to seed trailers, but they need to think of the viral catalyst they could leverage if they were to seed the trailers (or even specially cut, “exclusive sneak peak” trailers) among 20-30 influential travel bloggers, forums and travel websites. With just a little more effort on their part and help from viral marketing specialists they could micro-target the trailers in order to reach a critical mass of buzz faster and help drive potential guests to their website.

But enough of my commentary. The fact of the matter is that these films represent an online media element in a larger, integrated-media marketing campaign. And that is exactly how companies need to start thinking. With the promotion the Ritz has lined up, the shorts should draw a lot of traffic to the Ritz website (which will hopefully have tailored landing pages for the younger crowd). Additionally, the use of social media outlets for the trailers will allow for potentially explosive viral spread. With proper execution, some micro-targeting, strategic seeding and tracking, and monitoring of the blogosphere, Ritz should be able to execute a very successful social media campaign that generates a lot of buzz and a lot of new business.

Sources:

• Tamara Audi, “Ritz-Carlton Web Films Play Down Its Ritzy Image,” Wall Street Journal, 11/30/07