Viral Marketing from Former Student

Kohl’s Simply Vera Vera Wang and Life in Rhythm Spring creative are up on YouTube.

Start forwarding them around and get those views up! JC Penney’s American living is up to 288.

Quick reference

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3zXnO2IhA4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWcFo9QV7Ak

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxGObUKnx0M

Whopper Freakout Buzz Short-lived

Trend search from Icerocket.com shows that the blogger buzz behind Whopper freakout was short-lived.

For a day, I, too, thought it was interesting.

Vote on Future of Bonds' Record 756 Ball

Vote here.

Read about Barry Bonds' delusion here.

What I Look Like in Simpsons' Springfield

Here is the latest installment of fun viral content meant to hype something.

As part of the Simpsons' new movie, you can Simpsonize yourself.

You upload a photo, and voila, you have completed the first step in becoming a Simpson character. Admittedly, they were a bit lazy in their programming, because other than sharing a "Y" chromosome, I don't have much in common with this guy.

There is also much Burger King propaganda on the Web site.

And I have to admit that I am a bit bitter about not having had time to drive to Dallas to see the 7-Eleven turned into a Kwik-E-Mart.

Thanks to my friend, Joy, for blogging about this and bringing it to my attention.

Why You Spend $2.6 Million on Super Bowl Ad

Compare the blog buzz the day after the Super Bowl for frequent advertiser Bud Light (blue line with big spike) versus non-advertiser Miller Lite (red line that's flat).

Trend courtesy of IceRocket.com.

Complete Thoughts on Super Bowl Ads

As always, I overestimated local journalism. Rather than post our actual thoughts, the A-J simply posted our top and bottom ads. As a moment of pride, fellow advertising professor Harsha Gangadharbatla and I both ranked the vile Snickers ad as the worst. The difference was that Harsha's picture was on the cover, while I made the jump. Pandering to diversity, I tell you (kidding).

Then I picked up USA Today to see that the Snickers ad made the top 10. It's the end of the world, people.

Since these thoughts got edited out of the A-J, here is what I thought. Feel free to pan me.

LUBBOCK, Texas -- Overall the Super Bowl ads were lackluster this year. Early reports suggested that humor was the dominant theme and that most of the ads fell short. That was the case. Several of the ads elicited a smile at best.

To me, Bud Light was the clear winner. All of their ads were funny and in keeping with their brand image. And Bud Light’s ads actually made me laugh. They had three really clever ads, and it was difficult for me not to name Bud Light ads as all of my favorites. So we will be talking about these ads Monday, and the ads might actually increase sales.

CBS was another huge winner that will not occur to most people. I counted dozens of promotions for CBS shows, many of which already top the ratings. The promotional spot with David Letterman and Oprah in Colts and Bears jerseys was among my favorite spots of the night. CBS promos were everywhere. CBS came out of the halftime show promoting 5 straight CBS programs and specials.

There is an old adage in advertising, “it isn’t creative unless it sells.” Too often Super Bowl ad producers forget this. Sure, you might have a clever idea, but if it has nothing to do with the brand, it will not affect sales. Being effective is the real goal.

The Pizza Hut ad with Jessica Simpson in the pre-game show will not top anyone’s list. But it may have been the most effective ad of the night. Just before kickoff is the perfect time to order pizza, and that ad likely both caught attention and led to sales. As an advertising professor, I like that.

Coca-Cola’s return to the Super Bowl was underwhelming. The Grand Theft Auto videogame takeoff was clever, but it’s been circulating on Youtube.com for weeks. So for much of the target audience, the GTA Coke ad was stale.

Ford also underwhelmed me. In truth, the locally placed Ford ad promoting Texas patriotism was the best automotive ad that I saw tonight. And this cost Ford far less than $2.6 million.

There were several contests this year inviting the audience to submit ads. I think this “category” was won by the Chevrolet HHR car wash ad created by University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee student Katie Crabb.

Both academic research and sales data show that sex for sex’s sake does not sell (e.g., Paris Hilton for Carl's Jr.). GoDaddy.com fell short to me. Although sex ties back to the name, it has nothing to do with the company’s business.

Conversely, beer, Coca-Cola, and snacks are exactly what the Super Bowl is about. That’s why these products are a natural tie in.

I awoke to these words this morning from my dad and advertising industry executive, Sam Bradley version 2.0:

"I didn't see a single commercial that made we want to remember to try their product. I thought a couple were entertaining -- not brilliantly so."

Lite Brite Is Not a Bomb

Sorry. I just don't get it. Much ado about nothing, I say.

The Boston guerrilla marketing campaign gone wrong falls upon the perceivers rather than the stimulus. When I saw the thing, I thought, "it's a bleepin' Lite Brite." Then I read this quotation on CNN.com:

"It's so not threatening -- it's a Lite Brite," said twenty-two-year-old Todd Venderlin, a design student at the Parsons School of Design in New York City, saw one of the devices two weeks ago as he left a lounge in south Boston, according to The Boston Globe.

Seriously, the whole terror threat thing is absolutely out-of-control. I tried pretty hard not to think about this whole deal, but two e-mails from my dad forced it into my conscious perception.

My dad, Samuel D. Bradley version 2.0, wrote: "During the golden years of local radio (1950 to 1975), hiding things for the public to find was a widespread promotion practice. In 1954 or 1955, WHB radio in Kansas City held a "Treasure Hunt", with a paltry first prize of $1,000. They broadcast clues to where the prize was hidden. Huge traffic jams blocked major streets leading to the hiding place. But no one thought of a law suit. It was all great fun for everyone but those of us working for competitor stations -- we kicked ourselves for not thinking of the idea first.

"In 1963, the station where I worked increased transmitter power from 1,000 to 5,000 watts. As part of our promotional efforts, we acquired dozens of little battery operated, transistor clock radios. We turned each one on, tuned to our station, put them in plastic bags and 'hid' them all over the city. Imagine walking through a park, hearing music coming out of a tree, and finding a plastic bag sitting in a fork of the tree. People picked them up, saw what they were, and stole them.

"Boston says they spent a half million dollars trying to solve the problem of the little blinking thing. The mayor is demanding stiff penalties, lawyers are talking about class action lawsuits, competitors of Turner Broadcasting are dancing in the streets and some of us are shedding a tear for what we have lost in America."

If the first amendment protects flag burning and the Klan, surely a Lite Brite is protected speech. A hidden Lite Brite is not quite shouting "fire" in movie theatre.

Shameless Plug for Icerocket

In part, this Weblog is the continuation of a stimulus-response research project that started when I wrote a weekly column for the New Mexico State University student newspaper, the Round Up.

It never ceased to surprise me what topics stuck a cord with people, and how people interpreted my words.

That continues here with the things that I hear from colleagues and from comments, which I enjoy.

Recently I wrote about the creepy Redenbacher popcorn ads and the response to them on the Web. To illustrate the buzz on Weblogs, I included a trend search from uber-cool company, Icerocket.com.

Those posts have funneled dozens of people to this Weblog. And the amusing part is that Statcounter.com keeps the search terms people use to find this Weblog. Not surprisingly, people got here by Googling "Redenbacher" and some negative adjective. This means that people thought the ads were bad, and they wanted to see who else did.

But the tangential mention of Icerocket.com led to a surprise. It led to a comment by Blake Rhodes, of Icerocket.com. He said thanks for using and suggested a new tool they have. So I Googled the guy's name.

He's the bleepin' CEO. Wow.

Now that's how you run a company based upon Blogs. You check out what people are saying about you. You monitor the buzz.

Good show, Mr. Rhodes. I wish I had some money to invest in Icerocket. With this kind of attention to detail, good things are sure to come.

So, dear reader, please accept my shameless plug for Icerocket.com. It's a super cool tool, and you can lose a few hours just playing with the trend tool.

As a media consumer, Icerocket is cool. As a media scholar, I think it is a powerful tool for understanding this new medium.

Creepy Popcorn Ad Has Blogosphere Buzzing

It is often quoted that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

This, obviously, is not true. Just ask Gary Hart. Or look at the summer 2005 Carl's Jr. advertising campaign with Paris Hilton (a blend of sex, eating a hamburger, and washing a car; view it here). It created a lot of buzz, but it didn't sell any burgers.

One of my favorite tools in the "new media" world is Icerocket.com's trend tool. This allows you to see the trend of how often a phrase is mentioned in the Blogosphere.

Icerocket allows you to take an instant pulse of the online community.

Friday I addressed the creepiness of Orville Redenbacher's new ads. I was not alone. Lots of people were saying bad things about these ads. But was the important part the mere fact that we were talking about Orville Redenbacher popcorn?

Television time is very expensive. A single 30-second spot in national prime time is often more than $300,000. Thus, it is a beneficial advertising strategy to air ads that will generate their own buzz. If you can air ads just a few times to solicit people to search them out online (where viewing costs you next to nothing), then you have saved a lot of money.

As the figure here illustrates, the creepy ads created a spike in blog talk about the popcorn (blue line). For reference, I included a competitor, Jiffy Pop (red line). No such spike these. Hence, we have some evidence that the spike is due to the ads and not some national discussion about popcorn.

Yet it remains to be see the effect on sales. Using either Icerocket's search engine or Blogger's, almost every post I saw was negative. It's hard to imagine how this will translate into sales, and I know that I will specifically avoid buying Redenbacher after these ads.

I still refuse to buy Duracell batteries after their weird clay-mation ads of the mid-1990s. We'll see whether Joe Consumer will punish the popcorn giant.

Panasonic Viral Video Tacky, But I Laughed

Be warned. This "viral" video by Panasonic is very tacky, and at least PG-13.

You can see the punchline coming well before it arrives. But I laughed anyway.