Dallas Clayton created “An Awesome Book!” The story is universally appealing and brilliantly illustrated. The way Dallas has promoted the book is also incredibly inspiring:
“With a traditional publisher, you go to stores and you try to read the book to audiences to sell it to them. Since I did this all myself I can do whatever I want. My idea was to read the book to as many kids as I could and for every book that I had already sold I wanted to give one away.”
You can read the whole book here.
What happens when advertisers take their campaigns to the streets? Street artists fight back.
From Agenda Inc.:
Saatchi & Saatchi has eschewed traditional advertising techniques in favour of a more subversive, and possibly even illegal, method of getting its message across. As part of a £20 million campaign for a new Brazilian spirit it is spray-painting graffiti images on walls and buildings in the East End of London as a way to reach young consumers immune to conventional advertising.But the campaign appears to have backfired. Real street graffiti artists have begun taking “direct action” against the interlopers. At the centre of the battle is a Christ-like figure dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, which has been sprayed in fashionable areas such as Brick Lane and Old Street.
The stencilled figure, based on the Christ the Redeemer statue that overlooks Rio de Janeiro, is part of global advertising for Sagatiba, a brand of cachaca. However, street artists have identified the figure on websites and resolved to deface it wherever it appears. Posters have been torn down, stencils papered over and one image has had paint thrown over it.
Read the original article from The Times, UK which has an interesting definiton of viral marketing: marketing which “allows consumers to think that they have discovered a product.” Huh?
Earlier this week, Tiger Woods made an unbelievable shot in the final round of the Masters and overnight Joseph Jaffe turned it into an ad for Nike earning him over 50,000 hits in a few days when he posted a 30-second and a 60-second version to his site.
In December 2004, George Masters’ iPod ad got a lot of press as the first ever homemade advertisement to ‘go viral’ and go big with 37,000 hits in just a few days. Masters made the ad and then posted it online to solicit feedback.. “Is this good?” he asked. He had no clue that his ad would become so popular or spread so quickly.
These two events represent a new wave of viral marketing, what I’m terming participatory viral marketing, in which individuals who are simply fans of a product or brand independently produce and post their own advertising spots which end up being incredibly popular. The video-editing software that comes with most home computers makes it possible for just about anyone to create professional quality ads. But it isn’t just the quality of the ads that makes them viral successes. Corporate marketing guys with far bigger budgets are falling all over themselves trying to figure out how to develop enough hype to make campaigns go viral by themselves. Yet overwhelmingly, the purchasing and placement of ads supporting a viral media campaign undercuts the viralness of the campaign itself; as soon as I see a two-headed dog on a billboard or at a bus stop I know it’s a top-down organized campaign by some big corporation (MTV2) that paid to put it there and I filter it out as more of the same old advertising noise and nonsense.
If homegrown ads are the message of participatory viral marketing, blogs are the medium. It’s not a coincidence that both the Tiger Woods and the iPod ads were posted to personal blogs. Seeing the ad on a personal blog establishes the ‘viral legitimacy’ of the ad: some guy like me made this because “hey, he just loves *insert brand or product name here*!” and he posted it to his personal site which someone sent me a link to or which I stumbled across. There is no connection with or involvement from the company who’s product or brand is represented. There is also no submission or approval process. People just happened to find this corner of the internet where the ad is posted. The whole process wreaks of word-of-mouth marketing, which is exactly the way viral media campaigns try to work.
The fact that consumers, who traditionally are passive receivers of advertising, will make their own ads supporting these products in their spare time for no reward other than the love of the product/brand signifies said product/brand is worth tremendous value at least in the hearts of those who make the ads. It’s only a matter of time before we see corporate marketers faking it, reproducing these homegrown viral marketing successes by posting ads to fake blogs, when they should really be focusing on ways to encourage participatory viral marketing, such as releasing high quality assets for more people to make more ads and publicly recognizing and rewarding past successes.
The other day I saw a banner ad for axe2grind.net. I forget what it looked like but it was sufficient enough to clue me in to another corporate viral media campaign. Note to corporate-viral-media-concocting-advertising-guys: if your viral campaign is good it will go ‘viral’ by itself spreading by word of mouth, email, etc. without banner ad buys. I’m sure it’s a lot more fun to work on ‘crazy’ ideas for a viral media website than do shoots for those stupid and weirdly ambiguous Axe subway ads in NYC (so I’m supposed to imagine that so many women are lining up outside the apartment door for the guy inside that they have to take ‘numbers’??), but it’s not working.
Axe is framing the site as a “free forum that documents the string of bizarre occurrences that have recently taken place in many parts of the country. The young men in these incidents share one common thread: they have all used AXE Deodorant Bodyspray.” I have to assume that this is all in self-mocking fun because this idea is so played out; to think anyone would believe the legitimacy is pretty laughable, although the GeoCities-esque background and hit counter straight out of 1998 are legit.
Ok so I’ve ripped on the project, but I do like that they take advantage of different types of media: first-hand video testimonials, Blair Witch Project inspired documentation, photographic evidence, and audio of answering machine messages. And that they take user submissions of content, although there doesn’t seem to be much of an incentive for participation, especially since they’re downplaying the corporate nature of the site (no big Axe giveaways here).
Yes this is just another one of many many many viral media advertising campaigns. But just because you make it ‘viral’ doesn’t mean it is relevant, engaging or that the campaign itself is self-sustaining.