Yellow Pages in New Zealand invited people to come and build a house out in the wilderness on a tree. One — Tracy — of 200 applicants was selected and her story of building the house using 65 suppliers off the Yellow Pages was followed on a regular basis as the campaign idea to promote Yellow Pages and its usefulness. Tracy’s story was followed avidly on both traditional and new media as viewers got involved with her tears and joys of getting her tree-house restaurant going. The story made waves and, not surprisingly, the restaurant opened to full house in its initial weeks. But the brand — Yellow Pages — got so much mileage that both its awareness and usage jumped up exponentially. The Yellow-Tree house campaign went on to win a medal at Cannes.
Burger King asked its aficionados to sacrifice 10 friends on Facebook to get a Whopper free. In one week, the news spread like wild fire, two hundred thousand friends were sacrificed and the brand got millions of page views and eyeballs. The programme stirred a debate on the “ethics” of such an activity and Facebook had to finally take the offer off its pages. But with the sacrifice of the idea, the Whopper Sacrifice had established how tasty its burger was that 20,000 lovers were willing to give up friends for it; and many others had to think more than twice whether to join in. The campaign demonstrated insightfulness into Facebook — many of us just enjoy collecting friends and increasing numbers against our name even when we don’t feel anything towards them.
T-Mobile organised a flash mob in a London metro station at peak hour on a working day. Hundred dancers came together, all of a sudden, just as a flash mob, to dance uninhibitedly in the foyer of the station. Spectators around shot pictures of the dance and sent them to friends; others called friends to share what was going on and many others just joined in the madness and had moments of fun. All this was captured by cameramen and edited into a film that was later telecast as a T-Mobile film, capturing the brand’s philosophy of joy of sharing. The event itself created a buzz and had media talking about it; the audio-visual kept the momentum going on the Web and traditional media. The advertising kept the media-editorial buzz going.
Finally, IKEA leveraged the tagging practice on Facebook to circulate, through a store manager’s account, pictures of new furniture in its store. It ran a contest that said the first person who tagged an item could take it away free. Not surprisingly, friends shared the contest amongst themselves, alerting each other to claim an item fast. And, at no cost — beyond the costs of the items — IKEA spread the news of its promotion.
What’s particularly fascinating about these four ideas is that besides being unconventional and using new media innovatively, they are ideas that scale through the buzz they create and are able to seamlessly use multiple media without having to actually execute them and pay for them. There is no new news in the product — except maybe IKEA — but the idea is so exciting that multiple media, including consumers themselves, pick it up and spread it. Controversy is part of only one of them — Whopper Sacrifice — the rest are just insightful of human behaviour and stories that have human interest that get people to be engaged and talking.
As we move into more cluttered media and commoditised brands, the challenge for communicators is to create ideas that build momentum for themselves. Stories have to be told in a way that gets viewers and readers to track them. Innovation is the name of the game. However, innovation needs to go beyond “gimmicks” that get you noticed but forgotten… very often noticed by only a few. Doing a live hoarding — having a catwalk on hoarding — or an innovative layout in press, or placing brand in programme is a step but a small one with no scale and hence little impact. Innovation is needed in thinking the idea itself rather than innovation in the execution of the idea.
There is much buzz about how Aamir Khan promotes his films and the blockbuster success of his last three films is partly attributed to innovative marketing of the films. There is no doubt that his films come with very interesting marketing ideas — Ghajini haircuts in salons, ushers with the same hairstyle, dolls and mannequins; his incognito visits to small towns to promote his film Three Idiots. All make for nice innovations in media. However, it’s debatable how much these activities did go to create impact beyond salience — did they actually help persuade viewers to go and see the movies? Aamir Khan as a brand has enough equity and intrigue to get viewers to see the movie — such innovations helped break clutter to keep the new film top of mind.
Mainstream brands need to do more to engage and persuade viewers — many don’t have Aamir Khanesque equities. There is need to develop new metrics to measure the effectiveness of ideas — beyond reach, comprehension and likeability. It’s about the buzz power of the idea, the ability to get media and consumers talking and writing about it, either in the traditional editorial space or the new media space. It’s about the engagement power of the idea — the ability to get consumers to track the story over a period of time.
A few years ago, Hutch, to promote a theatre festival — Rangshankara — in Bangalore, got actors to perform drama in youth hangouts. On the premises, a boy fought with another who he alleged was eyeing his girlfriend. It all appeared real — till it was revealed — to see more drama come to the theatre festival. The festival was sold out before it opened. It was bold, it was different and, not surprisingly, won all the awards in India and abroad — acknowledgement of its lateralness.
India is a different market. To get buzz and engagement on scale in a market of size 1.3 billion and as heterogeneous as India, is a challenge. But given the creative minds available in this country, it’s certainly not insurmountable — go beyond gimmicks into impact.
Something worth thinking about.
The author is country head, discovery and planning, Ogilvy and Mather India. The Views expressed are personal. Contact at: madhukar.sabnavis@ogilvy.com
