Tag Archives: theonion

Online Video

The Onion Lampoons Viral. Tide Runs With It.

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Last week, The Onion ran a wonderfully fictitious article by “Fred Hammond, Director of Digital Video and Social-Media Ad Integration, Tide Detergent.” Onion, you had me at hello. The desperately hipster editorial promotes his own low-involvement brand, and all of the cool (yet faux) social-media programs that try to engage Tide customers. Clearly Fred has read my “Stupidest Article on Social Media Ever.”

My absolute favorite line: “Go to Tide’s website and hang there for a while. It’s a totally awesome place to go and play online games and meet other cool fans of Tide products.” Because we always want to hang out with fellow customers of our brands.

The article opens by making reference to an “awesome new web video by Tide detergent.” A video that “everyone is discussing it on popular blogs and linking to it from social media platforms.” Sadly, there is no such video.

But in a self-deprecating and timely display, Tide and Digitas filled that void. Embedded below, please find Tide’s very own lampoon, which has already gotten some industry trade magazine attention (MediaPost). Per The Onion, Tide provides a hip rocker, puppets and groovy 80s music. Just 10K views so far, but that beats the ExpoTV product reviews littering Tide’s YouTube channel with views as low as 15. Even more notable is the sheer number of positive “likes” the video has so far (even though we know where some of those are coming from). And the video ends well like those rare SNL skits. Meet the bird in the laundry basket who tweets the finale.

Tweet

Some brands have cringed from The Onion satire. Others would have ignored it and moved on. Tide and Digitas get credit for embracing it, and riding it fairly quickly — especially by P&G standards. Despite my temporary Twitter hiatus, I couldn’t help but notice an @nalts tweet by Digitas’ John McCarus (who I met while working on a different P&G brand). His self congratulatory tweet just fits the whole thing beautifully.

Now for the learning for brands and social media folks:

  • Laugh at yourself. It makes others laugh with you, instead of at you.
  • Humanize the brand as being self deprecating
  • Move quickly (this wouldn’t have worked as well if it took one more week to post)
And the final lesson is revealed in this priceless quote by the fake author: “Everybody in my office has been going crazy for this video. It’s practically all we’ve been talking about.” Do everything you can to avoid drinking your own Koolaid and thinking/communicating that your brand is way cooler than it is. Let other people tell me how cool your brand is. 
In appreciation of this campaign I promise to: a) buy Tide, b) give Digitas props, c) not sue P&G for infringing on my Nalts logo.


 

Online Video

Bring Back Pundit Joad Cressbeckle, Onion

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Oh sorry. I suppose I could have just e-mailed the folks at The Onion, but it’s just as easy to blog them. And hope their social-media monitoring tools dig deep enough to find this blog (ranked just below the left-handed lesbians’ jewelry accessory blog).

BRING BACK PUNDIT JOAD CRESSBECKLE (seen here expressing his concern about humanized potatoes)…

Warning human 'taters: "I got my good friend colonel James Bowie right here, same as cut the Chinese."

To see video: Joad Cressbeckler Fears Genetic Modification Causes ‘Wrath-Minded Taters’

Killer Video, Nalts, Online Video, popular videos, Video Sites, Viral Video, YouTube

Appear Better Informed About Darfur in 3 Minutes: The Onion Makes Me Cry

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Darfur. We both know how serious it is, but we’re not sure exactly why or where it is.

The Onion (helping you seem more informed”) has produced this fantastic parody of news analysis. It’s called “How Can We Let Darfur Know How Much We’re Doing For Them.”

picture-10.pngI’ve never laughed as much in preparing a post for this silly blog- in fact cried laughing (to use a bad pun). The Onion, I hope you know, is a website/print publication that has made the single finest transition to online-video content. The Onion News Network is as well written as the website I used to eagerly anticipate each Wednesday (in fact, it was literally the only website besides Google that I checked routinely in the early part of this century). But the acting is what cinches this. The acting is better than amateur online-video content, and most of television.

Watch each of these actors and realize how easy it is to believe that they’re real analysts and you’re not supposed to be laughing- the cadence, the off-camera glances, the “pile on” comments, and the timing. Folks if you’re watching, I’d kill for a cameo. No charge, and I’ll get their with 24-hours notice. 

The onion logoAccording to Wikipedia, (but watch out because The Onion reminds us Wikipedia is prone to error), The Onion launched The Onion News Network, a daily web video broadcast that had been in production since mid-2006. An early story featured an illegal immigrant taking an executive’s $800,000 a year job for $600,000 a year. The Onion has reportedly invested about $1 million in the production and has hired 15 new staffers to focus on the production of this video broadcast.[11] Carol Kolb, former editor-in-chief of The Onion, is the head writer.

In a Wikinews interview in November 2007, Onion President Sean Mills said the ONN has been a huge hit.

“We get over a million downloads a week, which makes it one of the more successful produced-for-the-Internet videos,” said Mills. “If we’re not the most successful, we’re one of the most.”

TheOnion has a YouTube account (with an atypical banner that allows viewers to drop directly into its podcasts, website or RSS) since March 2006, but its videos are all relatively new to YouTube (past several months). As of this post, I have about 35,000 subscribers on YouTube, and The Onion has about 13,000. I’m willing to bet that the network has twice as many subscribers as me by the summer.

I’ve often said that quasi professional content is on the rise, but this isn’t fair to call “quasi.” The only reason this content isn’t a better version of SNL is because there’s not enough of it, and perhaps it appeals to a smaller segment of the SNL audience with primarily news parody. Then again- it works for Jon Stewart.

See: FDA recalls pot pies because they’re hungry and the plight of lost hikers.