Yes, you probably already realized that your marketing campaigns send a strong message about your company. And if not, I hope yesterday’s post made you consider just that point. But did you also know that your old campaigns, just like zombies, never die? And that your advertising can also represent really important ideas about racism, alienation, and alterity? OK, maybe that’s just Night of the Living Dead. But, according to Stuart Elliot of The New York Times, your marketing might really last a while:
MADISON AVENUE is coming up with a digital variation on an Irving Berlin standard: The campaign has ended, but the advertising lingers on.
Thanks to Internet staples like YouTube, Facebook and the special Web sites known as microsites, consumers can still see ads after the completion of the campaigns of which they were part — not unlike satellites that remain in space, visible to the eye, long after they have stopped being tracked.
The ongoing online presence for ads is different from how campaigns conclude in the traditional media, when television commercials and print advertisements cease appearing or billboards and signs in stores are taken down.
For instance, a wacky character named the Subservient Chicken, introduced in April 2004 to help sell a new TenderCrisp chicken sandwich for Burger King, is still on display on a section of the Burger King Web site (bk.com/en/us/campaigns/subservient-chicken.html).
[snip]
Campaigns now “are not necessarily with a start and end date,” said Marcel LeBrun, chief executive at Radian6, an agency that specializes in social media for clients like Discover, Microsoft Xbox and United Parcel Service.
If marketers are striving to “build and foster a community of advocates,” Mr. LeBrun said, they ought not be like “politicians who go online around election time and then disappear after the election.”
Chalk up another way in which the internet is changing the way marketing works. What’s cool here is that, like Chris Anderson’s concept of the long tail, the internet allows some traditional forms of advertising–basically anything other than billboards and print ads–to find new life in the new medium. It’s not as if you would approach your advertising without considering the consequences, but, yeah, here’s yet more reason to ensure that your campaigns really are getting across an appropriate message.
But here’s where this new life-span of marketing might get really interesting: some campaigns, says Mashable’s Brenna Ehrlich, may be designed specifically to beget parodies, spoofs, and spinoffs. Ehrlich begins her post by bringing to light a new report from Visual Measures which notes that Nike’s recent TV spot which featured a silent Tiger Woods staring into the camera “has prompted the creation of more than 100 spoofs, parodies, mashups, etc. These clips have garnered more than 7.1 million views and 15,000 comments.”
Here’s the original:
Ehrlich points to this Nike ad and Google’s Super Bowl spot to learn what makes an easy-to-spoof spot:
During this year’s Super Bowl, Google took the bold step of actually airing a commercial — on television. The ad, which dealt with a student who falls in love with Paris, instantly prompted jokesters to take to YouTube, where they unleashed a torrent of spin-offs.
Google’s ad made for good parody fodder for reasons very similar to Nike’s spot:
1). It’s an extremely simple ad. All you need is a Google browser — which pretty much everyone has — and some kind of camera. The Nike ad, as Visible Measures points out, is merely a continuous shot of Woods paired with a voiceover.
2). It’s an ad for a big company. People love to take down the giants. If you subbed Google for Dogpile (which is still around for some reason) and Nike for… I dunno… lame knockoffs, then people probably wouldn’t care enough to get out the sling shot.
If Ehrlich is right, it’s fascinating to see these giant corporations give their blessing, as it were, to spoofs and parodies. Most companies these days hold an extremely tight grip on their advertising, their online presence, and their reputations. This, of course, is the trade-off which comes with the type of consumer voice that comes with social media.
Would you rather have additional exposure to your message, even if that message might be the object of ridicule? How do you balance these competing objectives?
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