Collaborative viral initiatives are rare, but when they surface the campaigns are highly successful. Their secret: They are simple, short (10-15 sec), easily uploaded (via webcam, video camera or mobile phone) and universal! Like football, passing along an e-mail message, video message in a bottle or heart, an inspirational hand message, cheering or like Skype’s new campaign laughter, along with yawning one of the most basic and contagious human phenomena.
Nike’s Joga Bonito resulted in over 11 minutes of video from 30+ countries, the collaborative Gmail video from Google got over 1,100 clips sent in from fans in more than 65 countries, Tel Est Ton Coeur from Telethon collected 300 videos with 2 hours and 30 minutes of footage, and BT FON’s recent initiative “The World’s Biggest Mexican Wave” has currently an astonishing 12,560 uploaded videos!!
Portuguese soft drink brand Sumol has launched UGC campaign Sumol Best Tricks, to strengthen the bond and create engagement between the brand and youngsters, using video clips with skate icon Ruben Gamito and BMX star Miquel Cardoso.
The main communication idea suits with the concept of self-replication and sharing of ethnical, tribal and social origins. Connection point were extreme sport loving teens can watch and upload tricks is Sumol Best Tricks.
Campaign concept, site and videos are created by MindShare Portugal. The social media planning, social media optimization (natural seeding) and social media advertising (SMA) are done by SocialMedia8. The viral videos’ reach and engagement are measured with ViralTracker.
Do you know more UGC, Viral or Social Media campaigns from Portugal, Spain or the South Americas? Don’t be a stranger and drop us an e-mail.
Stop motion is hot! More and more videos using this technique are popping up on the internet. One of the best examples is the ‘Tony vs Paul’ video, which has managed to get over 4.5 million views on Youtube so far.
A trend like this doesn’t usually go unnoticed with marketeers and it was only a matter of time before a brand stepped in and joined the party. This time it’s Doritos, the American tortilla crisps producer.
Twitter is a great resource of information. I use it for several reasons, but the most important is the information people share. Links, little nuggets of information, stats and answers to your question, you can get it all. When it’s not down, obviously!
One of the gems I found on there was posted by Marco Derksen on Twitter, a list of internet memes. Nothing special, as there are plenty of those right? But the presentation of this one is brilliant. It’s a timeline with memes added according to date. You can zoom in, click on each item to get more detailed information.
And besides the timeline view, you can also watch it in flipbook and maps format. A great mash up if I ever saw one! And most of the viral videos of the last few years you can think of are on the list.
This item is a must read for all CMO’s, Media and Advertising agencies. You already know ‘curiosity killed the cat’. But do you know how the UK Band’s The Get Out Clause creativity killed media budget?
In the UK hang over 13 Million security cameras in the streets: Big Brother is watching you. It reminds me of the visionary 1999 thriller with Will Smith and Gene Hackman: Enemy of the State, directed by Tony Scott.
Following Nike’s 2006 Joga Bonito Soccer chain, Google’s collaborative Gmail video and the video message in a bottle by Greenpeace, BT FON has launched a fun new campaign called The World’s Biggest Mexican Wave, to celebrate the new online/communications partnership between British Telecom and FON, raise awareness of the world’s largest Wi-Fi community and to find out which football team in the UK has the most passionate fans.
Martin Varsavsky of FON explains why they chose the Mexican Wave: “Well, first of all it’s fun. Secondly a WiFi community is just like a Mexican Wave: people contribute with their individual (radio) wave, and the more people, the better it gets.”
Where most popular DJ’s and artists receive underwear from their female fans, Ferry Corsten gets a lot of video clips of people dancing and lip syncing to his world famous tunes. He says he enjoys watching them a lot, although maybe not so much as ladies underwear, and it inspired him to write out a contest for his newest tune ‘Into the Dark’.
Fans are asked to send in their craziest, funnies videos of them dancing to ‘Into the Dark’, everything is allowed. Although Ferry does display a sense of humour and a keen sense of what goes on on the internet as anything involving two girls and one cup isn’t allowed. At the end of the contest he’ll make a selection of the best videos, which will then be put into the video clip of the track he created with Howard Jones.
Giving fans (or consumers) a chance to interact with a brand through user generated content can be a great way to enhance engagement. It can also help to create ‘fansumers’ and will give brand advocates a great opportunity to talk about and interact with you.
User created content is still a point of contention for marketeers. Some companies are wary of ‘giving’ their brand to the consumer, others have no problem in doing so. We recently covered a few companies who have used a user generated platform to great effect, such as Domino’s Pizza’s pizza builder and Red Bull’s Flight lab. And also companies who have failed to grasp how new marketing works, such as Hasbro and Subway and Quiznos.
Now Hugo Boss has decided to give it a go. The Belgian creatives from RockandRollAgency have created the Hugo Create campaign. Visitors of the website are stimulated to use the Hugo Generator Design Tool to create their custom illustration based around the Hugo Boss brand. The created design can be downloaded as wallpaper or sent to friends. And the best entries will be awarded with £500 in prize money.
We do like hilarious UGC material, but we are mainly looking for compelling BGC (brand generated content) concepts and virals. Brands like Virgin Mobile, Virgin Atlantic and Burger King are a great catch for us, since they have lots of guts and thus also loads of glory.
But Jeep, MTV and Red Bull are also rebellious brands that are on our watchlist. Red Bull launched a great concept called Flugtag Flight Lab.
In the Red Bull Flugtag Flight Lab users can built a plane or take a flight. It’s a fun and facilitating concept. Do you know more great campaigns? Don’t be a stranger and mail them to us!
For anyone unaware of what Scrabulous is, it’s one of the most used and downloaded Facebook applications. Nearly 600,000 users play the game on a daily basis. The game was created by two software developing brothers, Rajat and Jayant Aganwalla, from Calcutta.
Hasbro found out about the game and decided they were being infringed on their copyright and ordered the game to be taken down. This sparked protest from Scrabulous’ loyal fans. The application which had reinvigorated the brand and re-acquainted hundreds of thousands of people with a game which was collecting dust on many an attic, was now being punished by trigger happy lawyers with no grasp of new marketing.
The latest news is that EA, who acquired the rights to bring Hasbro games into an interactive format last August, are going to produce their own online and interactive version of Scrabble.
I’m sure the hundreds of thousand pissed off Scrabulous fans are jumping for joy!
