November 23rd, 2008, 4 Comments »
I’m currently writing the chapter on YouTube in our forthcoming social media marketing book. I’m puzzling over a pretty basic phenomenon of the new media world: the stealth marketing video. Common examples include:
The process usually goes like this: These videos are posted with only obscure or oblique references to the brands they’re promoting. They’re remarkable and amazing feats (either real or CGI) make then viral hits on YouTube. Sooner or later, the companies behind them disclose the videos’ true origins.
What Do The Brands Stand To Gain?
As in the case of the Cardo Systems video, the company sometimes replaces the video with a new one promoting their brand. Alternately, as in the Ray-ban video, they add a link to their website.
However, in other cases–Levis and Guitar Hero–there’s still no indication on the video page that the video isn’t a legitimate, user-generated and unaffiliated with a corporation.
So why bother? The only tangible, measurable result that I can think of is the free media the companies earn when they go public with the revelation. Of course, this only pays off if the video itself is a success. How many of these corporate stealth videos never get revealed because they only received 8700 views?
There’s considerable value in that earned media. However, this article indicates that “Bike Hero” required four weeks worth of production by an ad agency. That’s quite an expense for what I imagine to be fairly middling media exposure.
As far as I can figure, there isn’t much of a brand awareness gain. After all, the videos usually don’t promote specific brands–that only appears in the subsequent media coverage. And “Bike Hero” isn’t effective unless you’re already familiar with Guitar Hero, the game.
There’s also the question of possible damage to the brand when it’s revealed that the videos are, in fact, from lame corporations. I don’t think that matters very much in the fluid world of YouTube, but it’s worth considering.
So what else do these brands stand to gain?
4 Comments »
September 22nd, 2008, 2 Comments »
As I mentioned, we’re heading off to Tofino for a bit of a writer’s retreat. I’m not sure how much I’ll blog this week. It may be as per usual, or the posts may be few and far between. We’ll be back into town on Friday night for BarCamp.
2 Comments »
September 9th, 2008, 14 Comments »
I’m not a huge fan of “The World is Flat”, but I’m keen to read Thomas Friedman’s new book, “Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–And How It Can Renew America”. And not just because Seth recommends it.
I’m buying more and more audio books these days. I’m choosing audio books because I can consume them while I’m exercising or walking from place to place. Plus, of course, it eliminates the environmental costs of manufacturing, packaging and shipping the book to me.
I went to iTunes to purchase the “Hot, Flat and Crowded”, and was a bit shocked at the price. Then I compared it with Amazon.ca and Chapters:
iTunes: $45.95
Amazon.ca: $19.50
Chapters: $23.52
I’m usually happy to pay a ‘green tax’ for more sustainable options, but this is a bit ridiculous. I’d have to pay more than twice the hardcopy cost for, ostensibly, less value. It’s ironic, too, given the subject of the book. Why do you suppose the audio book is priced where it is?
14 Comments »
April 11th, 2008, 1 Comment »
On the trip into Vancouver yesterday, I finally got time to watch a video of Clay Shirky’s excellent talk associated with his book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. If you work with or have a passing interest in the future of the Web, find forty minutes to bask in the shadow of Shirky’s big brain. You won’t be disappointed.
1 Comment »
April 9th, 2008, 7 Comments »
As regular readers will recall, last winter we wrote and self-published a 100-page ebook on social media marketing. In terms of our goals for the project, it’s been a success.
Thanks to Kris, we kind of accidentally met a literary agent who liked the ebook and wanted to shop it around. We wrote a (mercifully short) book proposal and the agent went to work.
Two weeks later, we had interest from No Starch Press, a San Francisco publisher with the slogan, “the finest in geek entertainment”. They have American distribution through O’Reilly Media, one of the giants of tech publishing.
We’ve since signed a contract, and have until the early fall to basically double the length of our ebook manuscript. It’s going to be a busy summer, but it’ll be cool to have a real dead-tree edition to wave around.
We’re going to change the title of the book, though we haven’t decided on the new title quite yet. We’ll probably blog more regularly on our ebook blog, writing about the process of expanding the book and possibly posting new draft material.
7 Comments »
February 19th, 2008, 2 Comments »
I don’t post these link lists very often, but I’ve got a bunch of tabs I’m keen on closing:
2 Comments »
January 28th, 2008, 72 Comments »
When walking alone through the medina here in Essaouira, Julie occasionally gets unwanted male attention. It’s low-key and harmless, and comes with the territory. It’s not nearly as bad as she’s experienced in Italy, though.
In both Palermo and Rome, she was constantly harassed by Italian men. She couldn’t sit down to have a coffee without some chotch doggedly attempting to join her. She was followed for a block down the street, and solicited by an aging hound dog who was definitely on the wrong side of seventy. These men really wouldn’t take no for an answer.
I got to thinking about why men behave this way, and about this evolutionary psychology book I wrote about (Derek wrote a more thorough review) a while back. There seem to be two possibilities:
- The success rate is greater than zero, and the effort involved is worth the occasional success. If they never succeeded, you’d think that they’d eventually give up.
- The behaviour has nothing to do with earning female affections, and everything to do with lekking. From Wikipedia: “A lek is a gathering of males, of certain animal species, for the purposes of competitive mating display.”
A premise of that book is that our brains stoppped evolving 10,000 years ago, and that our basic goal in life is simple: reproduction. Presumably the psychological goal of option #2 is to intimidate the other males in the lek, and get to the female first.
But why is this practice particularly common in Italy (I’m sure it’s common in other countries–this is just the worst among those that we’ve visited)? It’s probably cultural.
I wanted to use this photo to illustrate this post, but it was all rights reserved.
72 Comments »
December 24th, 2007, 2 Comments »
I know nothing about professional wrestling. I’ve never watched it. Like skateboarding or, I don’t know, BMXs, it failed to get its claws into me as a pre-teen.
And I’ve always been a little awed by the fervor of the fans, children and adults alike. They’re watching theatre, after all, and it’s all so gladiatorial. One of my profs (the eminent and talented Allan Stichbury) told me that if I wanted to learn how to direct theatre-in-the-round, I should watch professional wrestling.
Frequently, when we visit our local haunt for pizza, we’ll find the proprietor’s elder, gnomish father leaning back in a chair, watching WWE on the restaurant television. He barely speaks a word of English, but doesn’t need to. He just loves to see those glossy guys dive on each other off the turnbuckle.
That’s a long introduction to this CBC interview (MP3) I recently listened to with Bret “The Hitman†Hart. I guess he’s written a tell-all book. In the interview, he discusses a bunch of stuff I’ve always wondered about: just how fake is the ‘sport’? Is the blood real? Are all wrestlers on steroids?
I’m no more interested in wrestling than I was before hearing the interview, but I’m a little more informed.
On a related note, I submitted the CBC interview to Digg (there’s not enough, uh, sports content on that site). In less than 45 minutes, my Digg post was in Google’s index. I knew Google was fast, but I didn’t know you could measure the time-to-index in minutes instead of hours. Of course, I’m sure Digg gets plenty of attention from the Burning Eye of Google.
2 Comments »