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Matching entries from B.L. Ochman's blog
How to Make a Video Contest Succeed - or Suck
By B.L. Ochman Video contests by companies hoping for viral buzz and Google juice are as plentiful as mosquitoes on a humid summer night. But, like their insect counterparts, most video contests suck. While the rare video contest gets as many as 1,000 entries, many - like Denny's recent disastrous effort - get less than 10 entries. Apparently, 48 Denny's breakfasts over the next four years wasn't a big motivator. Contests can backfire. Just ask Chevy. Why are you a Republican in 2008? got this horror show entry, this charming Gotta Fuck the Democrats video, and this one. And they're not going away. Because on the Internet, content is forever. They may take them off YouTube, but they'll pop up on other sites. Count on it. How to make your video contest succeed: o Define success What do you want? Brand awareness? A lot of entries? Buzz in blogs? To drive traffic to your website? Sell product? Decide what your goals are so you'll know when/if you meet them. Sounds elementary, but most companies don't do it. Here are some things you can measure: * How many people are will learn about your brand? * How often bloggers are talking...
The Formula for Successful Viral Campaigns. Not!
By B.L. Ochman This successful viral ad is a classic. People loved the drum playing Cadbury Gorilla because it was unlike anything they'd ever seen. It was creative, fun, more than a little weird, and not a heavy-handed sales message. It's been spoofed, mashed up, and it's won awards. And it's been passed from friend to friend to friend - millions of times. This next video attempt at viral marketing is a failure. It would not be possible to say what Häagen-Dazs might have been thinking when they created this dreadful video to go along with this site. (It also would be impossible to rationalize the construction and content of the flashturbation honeybee education site that takes minutes to load, but that would be another post.) One type of viral will never fit all objectives, and trying to copy a successful viral is a sure recipe for failure. In fact, thousands of hoped-for virals are never noticed by consumers at all. What makes a campaign go viral? First let’s define viral marketing: content passed from one person to another, including images, videos, links, applications, games, stories, emails, documents or virtually any other type of digital content that one person passes...
Social Media Marketing: Who's Full of Hot Air? Who's The Real Deal?
By B.L. Ochman These days, everyone and her dog is a social media marketer, or so they tell us. But who’s really an expert? And who’s full of hot air? How do you tell the experts from the snake oil salesmen? Let’s define terms: o Social Media Marketing is helping companies to add tools including blogs, wikis, widgets, audio and video broadcasting, social networks, user-generated content, and peer to peer ratings to their communication mix. o The purpose of social media marketing is to engage enthusiasts and existing customers in an interactive community in order to drive more traffic and sales. This creates a highly involved audience who recognize and interact with the brand clearly. Who’s qualified to create social media strategy: o People with clients who actually pay them to create social media campaigns. o People whose ROI-driven campaigns actually produce traffic and sales. o People who create campaigns that are more than a clueless ad agency’s flash in the pan, gimmick, soon forgotten stunt or just plain dim. While there is no shortage of consultants who blog, talk, present at conferences, and preach about social media marketing, only a handful in the world have actually created successful campaigns...
Taco Bell Contest for User Generated Ad is Sure to Bite Them
Gizmoz has launched a contest for Taco Bell seeking user generated ads that will have a chance be shown on the TV broadcast of the 2007 M.T.V Video Music Awards. Gizmoz’ software lets you make an avatar from a photo. How many people do you think will try to make avatars from pictures of rats? And what will Taco Bell do? Refuse to show those? How long til they start showing up in YouTube, where the best ones are sure to go viral? Dear Taco Bell: remember Chevy Tahoe's ad campaign? Back in February, rats the size of the Taco Bell Chihuahua starred in a widely circulated video. Sure Taco Bell will keep advertising and promoting themselves. They have to, in order to survive. But before they open themselves to Internet scrutiny and user generated content, they need to tell us how they made sure that rat problem was fixed, and what steps they’ve taken to raise their cleanliness standards in franchise stores. Remember the Chevy Tahoe contest for user generated ads? The commercials people made were far from complimentary to Chevy and you can bet there’ll be more parodies in the ads for Taco Bell, and more rat avatars...
Will All Social Sites Join the Trend to Pay for User Generated Content?
How long will users be willing to keep generating advertising and branding materials without getting paid, asks Rebecca Lieb in a must-read Clickz column. Some social sites are starting to pay content creators. Certainly, she says, the agencies for huge brands like Chevy and L'Oreal can't be happy when the account goes up for review "and their rival's willing to work for a one-year supply of breath mints. Will it be long," she asks, "before diamonds in the rough emerge from corners of the Web other than the blogosphere and demand to be paid what they're truly worth?...
Top Google Results on "Chevy Tahoe" Net Negative Ads
Here's a Chevy Tahoe Apprentice Contest commercial that's helping the Chevy Tahoe brand by coming up number 15 in Google results on Chevy Tahoe. In fact, 10 of the top 20 results of a Google search for Chevy Tahoe are for negative ads made by customers. Oh yes, the campaign has really helped the brand. Big-time. Way to go Chevy! Related What's Next Blog posts...
L2: No Pro-Chevy Tahoe Ad Went Viral
Ariel Imrie at L2 makes a brilliant point about the Chevy Tahoe "do-it-yourself" ads:None of the pro-Tahoe ads -- not ONE -- has gone viral. Hundreds of anti-Tahoe ads went viral and will be online long after the Chevy promotion is gone. So what did Chevy really gain? Maybe an understanding of how vocal the anti-SUV community really is. I still wonder what the ad agency thought the public would say about SUVs, given the chance. Companies are lucky when customers complain. The ones they have to worry about are the ones who go away quietly and never come back....
Where Would We Be Without Google Adwords?
By B.L. Ochman Pretty funny, really, that the more negative posts I write about the Chevy Tahoe Apprentice contest, the more Chevy Tahoe ads Google serves on What's Next Blog. Reminds me of the time in 1999, when I wrote "Press Releases Are a Colossal Waste of Time" for Internet Day, and the ad that ran with the story was for a press release distribution service. Had I been them, I'd have asked for my money back....
Chevy Gets the Picture Not!
Chevy gets the Web, crows its agency to the New York Times. My friend and esteemed colleague Steve Hall at adrants, agrees Don't eat the victory pie so fast Chevy. You're still clueless. A spokeswoman for Chevrolet, Melisa Tezanos, said the company did not plan to shut down the thousands of anti-S.U.V. ads that have been consumer-created in the Chevy Apprentice make-your-own-ad contest: "We anticipated that there would be critical submissions," Ms. Tezanos said. "You do turn over your brand to the public, and we knew that we were going to get some bad with the good. But it's part of playing in this space." Hellllooo Chevy: If you really got it, you'd be asking your customers for suggestions on how to make your products make sense for the planet and then acting on their suggestions to create cars that will leave humans still able to live, and maybe even to drive some energy-efficient vehicle (hint, it won't be an SUV) in 50 years. What's your plan for responding to the negative ads? A company that gets it would have one. And they'd be announcing it now instead of talking about how they get the web. Posted by B.L. Ochman...
Something Fishy About BabelFish Machine Translation
Machine translations can be quite a hoot. Unless you are depending on them in business. "Misled ladies and horsemen of marketing:" began the advice in the BabelFish translation (to English) of a blog post -- written in Spanish -- by Andrés Bianciotto, manager of Area6, Mexico, tracking back from his blog, Verborragia, to my post on the Chevy Apprentice make-your-own-commercial contest. Here (he he) is the BabelFish translation:"Chevrolet sent to a campaign to the style "publicity 2.0" where it published a series of elements in line (music, sequences of video, images, etc) so that any person could compose an announcement on the new Chevy Tahoe and gain a battery of prizes. It is good, if this became or, Chevrolet could learn much of how their clients (or any individual interested in taking control of the prizes) saw and expressed the characteristics of the product. The bad thing, is that people are producing SO opposite announcements, that now in GM they cry and they erase them. Confused ladies and horsemen of marketing and publicity of GM: one is not "to leave network it forms the message, which later we appropriated ourselves", is to make a product or to offer a...
Won't It Be Funny When Chevy Tahoe Sends Cease & Desist Letters to Bloggers!
Posted by B.L. Ochman Proving that execs at big companies, and their agencies, don't monitor what's being said online over the weekend, Chevy left thousands of anti-Chevy consumer-made ads on the Chevy Apprentice make-your-own-commercial site this weekend. As fast as Chevy took many of them down today, the best ones has already gone viral and are now preserved on CNET as well as on scores of blogs, and hundreds are listed on the site Democratic Underground. To Chevy's credit, some negative ads are still on the site, but some of the juciest are long gone. The Chevy Tahoe contest rules say any attempt to "undermine the legitimate operation of the contest may be a violation of criminal and civil laws." Won't it be a pisser when Chevy starts sending out cease and desist letter to thousands of bloggers! Dear Chevy: Gas mileage, the environment, and big cars are not exactly a new issue. Hell, I got 32 miles per gallon on a 1967 Toyota Corolla! What did you think the public would do, given the chance? Here are some of my favorite anti-Chevy Tahoe ads:...
Chevy Tahoe Contest Ads Prove That Message Control is an Illusion
These two customer-produced videos, part of the Chevy Tahoe Apprentice online contest, may not be online much longer, but kudos to Chevy if they leave them up. They prove the point: Message control is, and always has been, an illusion. via Adrants Forum, where Steve Hall said "No big deal. Of course many of the entries would be negative and not exactly what you'd expect from a Chevy commercial and I'm sure they new that going in. There are a lot of these floating around now and, while they are SUV bashing, they are circulating. Besides, there's this thing people like to say, "Any publicity is...." You know the rest," Like I said: Marketing, like chocolate, is best when it is dark and complex in flavor. Posted by B.L. Ochman...
GM Launches Create a Canned Commercial "Contest"
Showing that Ad Age understands about as much about social media as the big ad agencies it serves, they rave about General Motors new online contest where consumers can pretend to create ads for Chevy Tahoe: "Joining the new trend of consumer-created advertising, GM is asking viewers to make and submit a 30-second spot for its Tahoe truck." Umm, no, actually GM is letting consumers "create" canned commercials. Players can add their own text to video clips provided by Chevy and drop them into a canned commercial with a choice of canned sound tracks. Then they can watch the commercial they've "created." Clearly, GM, or, more likely its ad agency, doesn't realize that the public is capable of producing incredibly creative, accomplished work. Take a look at consumer-created ads on YouTube, for example. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: message control is, and always was, nothing more than an illusion. Let that tired old idea go! The contest was announced on last night's The Apprentice episode which we didn't watch....
Chevy and FOX Deceive Millions With Product Placement
Here is product placement going, if not over the edge, certainly right to it. Chevy is way behind GM in its use of the Internet and this stunt did nothing to advance its status. Adrants reports that during Tuesday night's Major League Baseball All-Star game, FOX announcers feigned innocence over a fan banner that read HHRYA.com. Turns out it was a paid placement for the new Chevy HHRYA car, and it sent people to a website that was reportedly swamped and overloaded for half an hour. The site is a asks people to upload pictures of themselves with the letters HHR somewhere in the photo. Don't Treat Customers Like Morons I don't mind product placements. People can ignore them or not. But I hate deception and I hate to see consumers treated like morons. I would much rather hear the announcers say "there's a banner that points to a website you might want to check out," then to pretend they don't know it's a promotion. I bet just as many people would have gone to look at the site if they'd been upfront about it. Does Chevy really want feedback like this, from UK's The Register "Fox deceives millions during...
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