The WInd

Guess who this guy is?

Cadbury Gorilla Goes Viral In The Air Tonight

The video was originally posted at a Website called, Cadbury Dairy Milk - A Glass And A Half Full Productions, where it says this about the creative:

"Drumming gorillas, Phil Collins and Glass And A Half Full Productions? Well it just seemed like the right thing to do. There's no clever science behind it - it's just an effort to make you smile, in exactly the same way Cadbury Dairy Milk does. And that's what we aim to continue to do; simply make you smile."

What's a Wiki?

So what is a Wiki anyway? How can I use it for my business or personal life? Isn't it just a big encyclopedia online? Here's an explaination "in plain English"

(Actually Wikipedia is the ultimate online encyclopedia that lets you be the editor... So long Britannica! )

What is RSS?

Curious to know what all the buzz is about RSS? Here it is "in plain English"

Ask a Ninja about Podcasting

So you want to know what a Podcast is.... Well, just Ask a Ninja

“Shiny Toy Guns” in MySpace

Part of our job at Innvoasium is to keep you in touch with what’s happening on the Internet. So it’s a gift when we turn on the news and see Liz West at CityTV gushing about a band that’s used MySpace to grow their fan base.

The alternative band Shiny Toy Guns has leveraged the power of the Internet and My Space to build their business. Lead singer, Jeremy Dawson stated (roughly paraphrased) on CityTV, “Yeah, I could stand on a corner and hand out flyers but you’d be like who the hell is this guy? Better to have our online friends tell others about us.”

And Shiny Toy Guns friends have spread the word, they have over 250,545 friends and had over 5, 375, 814 views on their page. http://www.myspace.com/shinytoyguns

Shiny Toy Guns also uses the profile information from their MySpace friends to determine where they were going to tour and play. Their tour covers the US, Canada, the UK, England and Sweden.

Shiny Toy Guns has been getting lots of attention on e-music web sites but little to no play time on the radio. Finally they’re getting the attention of industry insiders. They’re anticipated to be “The Next Big Thing!”

So if you do hear Shiny Toy Guns on the radio in the next few months, you’ll know that their success was generated by the Internet!

The Phenomenal YouTube

YouTube grew by an astounding 616% between April 2006 and April 2007.

616%

Imagine if your boss told you that he was going to increase the sales goals of your company by 616% in a one year period, you’d quit. It’s not realistic. It’s phenomenal.

So what does this phenomenon mean to marketers?

There are three interesting marketing trends to watch with regards to YouTube

Word of Mouth Trend

One of the most moving videos I’ve seen on YouTube is “Free Hugs.”


Originally created by “Juan Mann”, Free Hugs has been viewed almost 16,000,000 times on YouTube. It’s inspired similar videos around the world including Australia, Korea, Amsterdam, Italy and Japan. And a World-wide Hug Day was organized in response to the video.
“Juan Mann” received international recognition for his kindness and was interviewed locally in Australia and by Oprah Winfrey.
Juan Mann claims that he had no ulterior motives – he’s not collecting names, phone numbers or addresses. He simply wanted to share a hug and bring some happiness into people’s lives. He clearly accomplished his goal.

Brand Created Entertainment Content

One stand out case – Evolution by Dove.


Initially posted on YouTube, the video “Evolution” made it around the world in just a few days. In just hours, three times more people viewed the Evolution video than watched the Super Bowl. Currently YouTube records over 9 million views and that doesn’t include the people who saw the clip on the news or talk shows.

Consumer Driven Product Advertising

User driven content means that you have to accept the good, the bad and the ugly.

Search M & Ms Candy on YouTube. There numerous videos many are uploaded by consumers and some of the content is not pretty….eating M&Ms from between their toes, eating 100 M&Ms in 5 seconds. But there are also some creative uploads – the M&Ms Addams Family is really clever.



User driven creative is valuable because it shows that the user is attached to the brand. True consumer generated content is inspired because of love of the brand

Consumer Driven Content is not the same as no the same as a Consumer Contest. A consumer contest means that consumers are participating because they want to win. There’s an incentive. Heinz Ketchup is running a contest on YouTube until mid-August. The winner who creates the best Heinz Ketchup ad will receive $57,000 and their ad on TV! So far, Heinz has received 645 entries and the average entry gets viewed 400 times – that’s over 250,000 times that somebody somewhere has watched a Heinz ad.

Multi-Channel Product Advertising

Chevy had what seemed to be a great Multi-Channel Advertising Campaign. The 2007 Tahoe was featured on and promoted through Donald Trump's The Apprentice, where the two teams put together a show for the top General Motors employees to learn about the new Tahoe. During the same program, Chevy launched a series of ads announcing an online contest apprenticechevy.com The online contest challenged viewers to create a commercial for the new Tahoe by entering text captions into the provided video.

During the contest, Chevy received over 22,000 entries. While many of the entries were sincere ads, Chevy also received numerous negative ads focusing on the fuel consumption of the vehicle. Environmentalists took the opportunity to produce spoof videos and published them on YouTube. A YouTube search on Chevy Tahoe produced 800 videos with the most viewed parody “The Ultimate Padded Cell” generating 9000 views. Was this all negative? Not necessarily, the word of mouth on YouTube was ultimately beneficial to Chevrolet and contributed to the 4 million page views, 400,000 unique visitors and 22,000 ad submissions on their site.

The microsite http://www.aprrenticechevy.com/ attracted 629,000 visitors. On average, those visitors spent more than nine minutes on the site, and nearly two-thirds of them went on to visit Chevy.com; for three weeks running, Chevyapprentice.com funneled more people to the Chevy site than either Google or Yahoo did. Once there, many requested info or left a cookie trail to dealers' sites.

Ed Peper, Chevrolet’s general manager, commented on the success of the campaign, “So, a few media pundits seem to think this social media program was a failure and others seem to revel in the apparent anarchy. In our opinion, this has been one of the most creative and successful promotions we have done.”

So how do we evaluate the success of a campaign?

Methods of Evaluation in YouTube Campaigns

Views – how many people watched your video on YouTube?
Ratings – did you get a 1 – 5 star rating?
Comments – how many comments did you receive? Where they favourable?
Favourited – how many people chose your video as a favourite?
Links – How many people linked to or embedded your video?
Embedded
Mash-ups – Was your video or elements of your video used by viewers to create a new message?
Chatter beyond the posting – Think about “World-wide Hug Day” – that’s chatter.