Carl And Ray Prove To Be An Online Blockbuster
I may have thought that this year’s Blockbuster Super Bowl ad was terrible, but I found this clip on Microsoft’s new Soapbox site very very funny. I’m pretty sure that this clip has been around for sometime, but I’ve never personally seen it on TV. Seeing the clip on Soapbox really made me think about ways that businesses could leverage the video sharing sites for marketing purposes. On one level, businesses could put their ads on YouTube, Soapbox and Stage 6 in order to get their brands in front of those viewers, but unless an ad spot is absolutely incredible, it will be lucky to get 10,000 views. You could pay to have the ad promoted to the front page of YouTube Google, but I think that there is a much more valuable way to use these sites.
With all of the video sharing sites, viewers are given the option of not only sharing the videos on their blogs and web pages, but they also have the ability to comment and rate the videos. While video sharing sites tend to skew to a younger demographic, getting real world feedback on the quality of an ad BEFORE running a commercial could be invaluable in finding out what works and what doesn’t work. In comparing Blockbuster’s Super Bowl ad on Google vs. this same clip on YouTube you can see that not only does it get significantly higher ratings, but it’s also inspired a techno remix and a number of blog posts talking about how cool the Carl and Ray ad campaign really is.
Over the last few years Blockbuster has had an awful lot of problems with their marketing campaigns and while they’ve been dialing back their TV ad spending lately, if I were running Blockbuster, I would bring back Carl & Ray as an online video viral campaign and start using these services to test the popularity of new characters and new ad spots. If something really takes off online, then you start using that for your commercials on TV, instead of finding out after the fact that an ad campaign completely sucks. If something doesn’t get any traction, then you haven’t really lost anything because bad commercials aren’t all that viral. (unless of course it’s really really bad) With as much money as businesses spend on airing advertising spots, a misfire can be very costly and by giving web users a “sneak peak” at upcoming commercials, companies could really benefit from the feedback provided and occasionally, they may even get some viral love by making their commercials easily accessible for consumers to view and to share.
Posted on October 13th, 2006 by Davis
Filed under: Marketing, VOD