[ paul isakson ]

Volkswagen UK Makes An Ad About Making Their Site

UPDATE (02 April 2008): Maybe I was just a little tired last night and not feeling the best. As Crawford reminded me in the comments, it's just meant to be fun and give you a good feeling about VW.

Volkswagen, at least here in the States, has historically been about "the joy of driving" if you will (Drivers Wanted) and this certainly touches upon the fun feeling you can get zipping around in a car you love driving. So, yeah... Maybe I was just in a bad mood and over-thinking it.

As I said near the end of the original post below, it is a well done site and the video is nicely done as well. I am certain a lot of people put a lot of hard work into launching the site. This wasn't meant to put them down in any way. It was a challenge to the business decision made here.

In digging around a little more, this might not be running on TV and just as a "viral" online video. I don't know for certain on that one since I'm not living in the U.K. If this video was made as a reward for all the hard work that went into building the site and then it happened to get put online and it was not meant to advertise the new site to the public, then this entire post is for naught.

Final note... Fun as this may be, the business strategist in me still says any money spent on this would have been better spent getting in front of people actively searching for a new car online.

I know, I know. Sometimes businesses have to have fun too. Especially if they're rewarding their employees and agencies for all the hard work that goes into what they do every day.

I'll quit being a grump now.

-- ORIGINAL POST BELOW--

I might be out on an island here, but does anyone else find it at all peculiar that Volkswagen UK made an ad/video to tell people they have a new web site? Won't anyone who is in the market for a new VW already be going there anyway? Isn't this just driving a bunch of traffic to your new site for the sake of driving traffic to your site? Is this really going to help sell more cars?

Schweppes Burst Self-ComBursts

Schweppes Burst from ipub on Vimeo.

I started this post ready to praise Schweppes for what a brilliant ad this is. And it is a brilliant one as far as ads go. But as you'll see, my experience degrades almost as fast as it was built up during my journey from watching the ad on Dino's blog to researching it more for this post.

Normally I'd just post the ad, mix in a few quick thoughts and be done. But for this, I thought I'd share the story of my experience with it since that is what we're creating now. Experiences. Not ads. Experiences. It's a tragedy really. Anyway, here we go then...

Measuring What Matters: A Lesson from Go Daddy

An article on AdAge.com yesterday reports that Go Daddy is bragging about the record web traffic the GoDaddy.com "Exposure" ad drove to their site during and after the game.

My reaction: A) I'm not surprised. B) Who cares. Who cares how many eyeballs they drew to their site? Last I checked, Go Daddy doesn't make money based on how many people visit GoDaddy.com. So why set that as a measure for success on your Super Bowl spot. To me it looks like this is all about supporting somebody's ego, not about driving business.

How many of those four million-plus eyeballs were people who will actually ever buy a domain? How many of those people explored an area of the site that was actually about what Go Daddy sells and not one of the six areas dedicated to showing off Danica, Candice or Amanda? And finally, how many domain names did they sell during these visits?

It's not about how many clicks or hits you get. It's what happens after people visit your site or after the click that matters. You can drive all the traffic in the world to your site with a gimmick. Sure gimmicks are fun and it might even be fun to see all those visitors coming to your site. But if those people are not the right visitors for what your site is about, who cares. It doesn't really matter.

As A Whole, We're Not Measuring Up

WARC published an article (.pdf available below if link goes inactive) yesterday stating that marketing effectiveness has reached an all-time low. The article is based on the Global Marketing Effectiveness Report, a study conducted by the Fournaise Marketing Group with 3,000 marketing professionals from around the world.

Here are some of the key findings reported in the article:

• 65% of all marketing spend in 2007 had no effect on consumers.

• Estimated wastage rates varied from 45% for business-to-business marketers, through to 65% for business-to-consumer.

• Just one in ten of respondents have automated systems in place to track the effectiveness of their spend.

• Of the 55% of marketers who do track the results of their spending, 80% do so manually, spending hours capturing, compiling and analysing data.

• Questioned on strategy, 70% of marketers believe that short-term revenue-boosting and lead-generation campaigns are more important than long-term intangible brand building (15%). A clear indication that marketers are under pressure more than ever before to generate results.

• Tracking marketing effectiveness topped the 2008 wish lists of 35% of marketers, and made the top three for 70%.

Hmm. Do you think that maybe it's time to start changing the way we do things?

Download Article

[image credit]

nike: no excuses

Sorry. What was your excuse again?

Brilliant.

Not sure how I didn't see this one until today, but WOW. The first time you watch it, it's quite powerful. And the second time, it doesn't lose much. If you watch it at Nike.com (U.S. site at least), you get a quick story about Matt at the end.

This spot sort of fits in line with a thought I've got in my head about the evolving role of TV advertising. That role would be moving from being the main brand message vessel to being a spark that makes you want to go engage in a conversation with that brand in another place.

It's too bad Nike didn't give us a place to continue this dialogue. Just looking at the comments on this video's YouTube page, it's clear that the message is received and people feel compelled to say something about it.

dear comcast,

I've been using your Triple Play service since I moved up here in September.

I'm a bit befuddled how a company that provides HD TV, On-Demand services and broadband internet can't find a way to remove current customers from various sales materials mailing lists.

Quit wasting paper, money and your customers' time.

You're not making many friends, let alone fans, these days.

Figure it out.

dove onslaught remix

Looks like Rye Clifton agrees that Unilever's doublespeak needs to be addressed.

found

dear jeep,

WTF?

unilever's doublespeak

Dove and Axe are both referenced frequently now for creating powerful, effective marketing communications that are focused and relevant to their respective audiences. Maybe doing such a good job with these two brands' marketing is why The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is calling out Unilever for saying one thing  and doing the opposite.

With Dove's Real Beauty campaign, they're taking a stand against marketing that creates an unrealistic and largely unattainable ideal for what beauty means for women. All the while with Axe (Lynx in the UK), they're using the exact form of marketing that Dove is going against - portraying models that fit this bill of unrealistic and unattainable beauty as lust-crazed women who can't help but ravish a man/boy wearing Axe.

It's a great example of how people are becoming more empowered to call for honesty from brands on a larger scale (or their parent companies in this case) and demand some kind of recourse. Sony Bravia is facing some of this same scrutiny right now, at least within the art and ad communities, and has addressed it publicly.

It will be very interesting to see if anything more happens here on the Unilever front beyond the quotes that appeared in the LA Times article.

how to spot a counterfeit nokia. no, wait...

Nokia, under the guise of the Healthy Computing Volunteer Group (HeCoVoG), has a new web site warning us that their N95 phone (along with its Nseries cohorts) is causing jealously among laptops. Apparently, the jealousy is so severe that the laptops are turning on their owners and attacking them.

The site has some nice features and a decent overall design. The idea of laptops biting their owners out of jealousy of a phone is even a bit funny. It does feel a lot like the Counterfeit Mini idea and I don't know if that's a good or bad thing really. While there are some things I like about it, this idea falls a little short for me.

First, while it's humorous, I think it may be too much of a leap. I don't believe there are many people at this point who would use their phone to browse the web over a laptop when given a choice. (With the exception of someone going through iPhone lust, of course.) Mobile web has come a long way, especially with some of the new "full" web enabled phones, but it has yet to get to a point where one would rather use it over their laptop for this purpose.

Second, and far worse in my book, is that this site tries to push a conversation among the audience way too hard. The tips page is overly directive with how they want you to use these "helpful tools." And every video in the site is closely followed by a link to "warn a friend" (jumps to your standard in-page email tool) or "warn your blog readers" (pulls up a window where you can copy and paste the YouTube direct link or embedding code). It would be one thing if it only had one or two of these things, but when you add in the blog and email pieces to the push to print out things and post them to warn others, it just gets a bit too prescriptive.

I wonder if they really thought about the audience enough on this one. Are the people who would buy and then use the N95 really mindless sheep who need you to tell them to forward something on to their friends or blog readers? Or do you think that someone who would be interested in browsing the web on a phone might, 1) already share things they like with their friends through email or on a blog on their own without you telling them; and 2) have a slight addiction to the internet and because of that they wouldn't need you to make this a paint by numbers process for them once they do decide to share it.

I suppose the folks at Nokia felt that something had to be done to try to steal some attention from the iPhone. I can understand that. I'm just not sure if this is it. Personally, I prefer the site they came up with to launch the N95 earlier this year.

My thoughts on this - Create content that is so good it has to be shared, give your audience some credit for knowing how to share it on their own, and don't try to force a "viral" campaign - let the quality of the content do that on its own.

[ found @ A brit planner in the Rockies ]