At the first of May, Levi’s released the first of 10 viral videos to kick off its global brand campaign for its 501 jeans. Two videos have been released so far, and they have been so popular that Levi’s is looking to integrate the viral campaign into the larger brand campaign. It is about time that online started influencing offline media. Check out the videos here:
Jumpin’ In
“Hollywood Jungle”
BMW, already known for being on the forefront of new media opportunities–evident by their introduction of BMW Films several years ago–is again proving itself to be a brand that can differentiate itself through digital media, with the launch of a campaign for the new 1-Series. Because the new vehicle is targeted at younger audience, BMW smartly chose to spend almost half their marketing budget online.
Reported in the NY Times:
“Almost half the spending for the campaign, estimated at $15 million to $25 million, is being devoted to online media. By comparison, executives at BMW of North America say, Internet ad spending for other models ranges from 1 percent to 15 percent of the total ad budgets.
“The online elements of the 1-Series campaign include letting members of Facebook…design virtual cars and send them to Facebook friends; buying dominant positions, known as take-overs, on the home pages of msn.com and yahoo.com; posting video clips on YouTube; and developing a microsite devoted to the 1-Series (bmwusa.com/new1).
“The campaign is indicative of efforts by mainstream marketers to alter their media mixes as consumers change their media habits. A recent survey by PQ Media projected that by 2012, advertisers will increase spending by 82 percent from 2008 in areas like search-engine marketing, online video and e-mail messages.”
However, while it seems like I would be in the target market (identified as 20-somethings and 30-somethings) for this new car, I can’t find the Facebook app or the YouTube videos. And, the microsite is hardly a microsite. It looks like any other car website where you can customize and price your vehicle. Am I missing something here? Someone, please tell me.
Well, maybe I will be able to find the traditional ads, which seem pretty cool too:
“There are some unconventional approaches for the traditional media, too. Three magazines — City, Dwell and Paste — are printing pure-white covers that are glued over the actual front covers of the issues; there are ads for the 1-Series on the other sides of the extra covers.
“And magazines like City and AutoWeek are running tiny ads for the 1-Series with numerical themes at the bottom of editorial pages, which double as page-number identifications.
“For example, there is an itsy-bitsy white car on page 26 of the April issue of the magazine City next to this sentence: ‘26: number of bones in right foot you’ll use to crush the gas pedal on the all-new BMW 1-Series.’
“At the bottom of page 60, there is a miniature red car and this sentence: ‘60: m.p.h. you can reach in 5.1 seconds with the all-new BMW 135i coupe.’
Supposedly, once you start surfing, you can’t stop. We are all information junkies and just can’t seem to get enough of it. Reported in the Wall Street Journal:
“What is it about a Web site that might make it literally irresistible? Clues are offered by research conducted by Irving Biederman, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, who is interested in the evolutionary and biological basis of the human need for information.
“Dr. Biederman first showed a collection of photographs to volunteer test subjects, and found they said they preferred certain kinds of pictures (monkeys in a tree or a group of houses along a river) over others (an empty parking lot or a pile of old paint cans).
“The preferred pictures had certain common features, including a good vantage on a landscape and an element of mystery. In one way or another, said Dr. Biederman, they all presented new information that somehow needed to be interpreted.
“When he hooked up volunteers to a brain-scanning machine, the preferred pictures were shown to generate much more brain activity than the unpreferred shots. While researchers don’t yet know what exactly these brain scans signify, a likely possibility involves increased production of the brain’s pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids.
“In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.
“It is something we seem hard-wired to do, says Dr. Biederman. When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’
“For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives.
“…technology is playing a trick on us. We are programmed for scarcity and can’t dial back when something is abundant.”
“Text Analytics–a general term for the mining and interpretation of written words–has been used for more than two decades, most notably by the defense industry as far back as the Cold War to read into the word choices and text of, say, a speech written by Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev.” — according to a recent article in Ad Age.
The article goes on to say that marketers are increasingly using text analytics to mine information from customer service surveys, e-mails, online forums, and blogs. “…while the blogosphere and social networks have so far not proved great advertising media, text analytics offers the potential to make them stronger marketing vehicles.”
Dove used the tool to not only understand reactions to their campaign, but to gain an understanding of what motivates people, which issues are most important to women in their target group, and how to create better products and messaging for them. All by using text analytics from content on its own message boards.
What a fantastic way to leverage social media tools with a quantitative analysis!