“Dear Stupid Marketer and Your Clueless Agency” was my original title for this article in Advertising Age. Fortunately I tamed it down given the audience. But hopefully a few folks will read it and overcome the myriad of myths about online video and marketing.
If I can just change one clueless agency or stupid marketer, it’s all worth it.
You sure write a lot for someone that makes videos about farts. I wish I knew how to read.
Better hurry:
“Beginning December 18, 2007, we plan to end support of direct consumer uploads to Brightcove.TV. As a result, you will not be able to upload new videos to Brightcove.TV after December 17, 2007.”
Well written article, Kevin. Those $150-an-hour Los Feliz and Hollywood Hills graphic artists and web designers must be sticking little pins in Nalts voodoo dolls over this article.
The nice thing about attacking “old media” or “clueless marketers or advertising agencies” is that (like Emos) you can’t take offense without admitting you ARE one. BTW- I don’t know what’s more bazaar. When my online video buds are reading my boring industry blog, or when my marketing colleageus watch my videos and just don’t understand how I “have so much free time.”
I would’ve liked to have seen you point to some direct case studies or something. You listed all the lessons, and they *sound* like good ideas, but other than the fact that a lot of people have subscribed to your videos of fourteen-year-olds with fart machines, you don’t offer any real hard evidence for why your lessons should be listened to at all.
I just found your site and your videos about a week ago, and I’ve been into most of your viewpoints on this subject and interested to keep following it, but that article sounded more like you were asking companies to give you money to market their products rather than giving real advice for the hits and misses of viral marketing.
Does the VW commercial with the suicide bomber result in more sales? How many people have paid for downloads of the Numa Numa song? If 2% of the people who watch the video of the stop motion “human skateboard” click through the shoe site that sponsored it, how many of those people bother to buy shoes?
Maybe that’s all stuff that real marketers already know, and the type of thing that they *do* teach you in business school and so you felt like you could leave it out. I didn’t go to business school, so there’s a decent chance of that. But my understanding of advertising is that you have to see something at least three times before it sticks in your brain (and really way more than that).
After I’ve seen a viral video once, I’m really close to done with it unless I’m having people over for a video watching party. That hasn’t led to the purchase of any product I’ve ever seen featured on YouTube, except for Diet Coke and Mentos, where the video looked like it would be fun to try and copy.
Am I alone in acting that way? It just seems like “views” don’t really matter anymore, and you have to really engage your audience and become one with them for you to see any sales as a result of an online video campaign…
Man, you are everywhere these days.
One of the nice things about a personal blog is that you never have to play nice with your titles. Toned-down title aside, great article. 🙂
I’ve often wondered if Nalts has a twin.
I read that the Charmin man Mr. Whipple died, thinking about it now he was kind of creepy. Does advertising really use spokespeople to sell a product anymore?
Mr. Whipple. Oh I remember him. And then there was the old guy on Sesame Street. And Mr. Rouper from 3s a Company.