I should begin by saying that, yet again, the fine folks at YPulse have made me stop and think. Their most recent post chronicles Gatorade’s attempt to rebrand (and score media attention) through their cryptic and much-discussed “G” campaign. (If you need a refresher, you can view a clip here. Essentially, Gatorade ran a series of unbranded, star-studded commercials in an effort to build buzz.) And it worked. For weeks, curious viewers flocked to the web, asking the Google Gods who was behind the ads. A few weeks later, the ruse was revealed, and just about everyone gave a collective nod and said to themselves, well, that sounds about right. Most media watchers agreed that it was a success — if a short lived one. One point Gatorade.
In an effort to build on the success, Gatorade has created a stand-alone microsite for the “G” brand. The site is designed to house a wealth of Gatorade-made video content, which, at least in theory, Gen-Y-ers will spend hours pouring over. This attempt is of particular interest to YMC since we’re in the business of helping brands connect with their consumers both physically and digitally. Now, to be sure, Gatorade (or rather, Gatorade’s creative agency) has made some excellent content. This stuff is stunning. I mean, they have access to Kevin Garnett, Tiger Woods, those weird masked dancing guys from that dancing show on Fox, and they have a budget, I’m sure, that rivals NASA’s. In that respect, Gatorade is just about the ideal client to develop a digital campaign for.
And of course, like any smart brand, Gatorade makes it possible to share the content they make on just about every conceivable platform. Add a video to your blog, your Facebook page, your, er, LiveJournal. It’s yours! Do whatever you want with the content, Gatorade tells us. But I wonder: is there enough opportunity for dialogue with the consumer? Sure, you’re allowing those share-happy Gen-Y-ers to send your 30-second video to their friends, but are you giving them a chance to really interact with the brand?
So, I’m going to open this up to y’all. What do you think of Gatorade’s efforts? Do you think this will resonate with Gen Y? Or is Gatorade not going far enough?
This is going to be an unusually short post (as it’s nearly midnight and youth marketers need their beauty sleep, too), but I wanted to note that Skittles is now forwarding to Wikipedia. For those keeping score, that means Skittles’ homepage on Tuesday was Twitter, Wednesday was Facebook, and Thursday is devoted to Wikipedia. (One can only guess that YouTube is on tap for Friday.) I think this confirms that yesterday’s move by Skittles to redirect their website to Facebook was not, as some claimed, a response to the occasional foul language that appeared on the Twitter feed, but a calculated decision to ride the buzz wave. (It remains to be seen if pointing their homepage towards Wikipedia is good enough for another day of news.) I said it yesterday, and I’ll say it again: I think this represents a bold and well-executed embrace of social media by Skittles. Will it reap long-lasting benefits? No, not necessarily. But it certainly got us talking. Just do a Google Blog search for “skittles” and you’ll see what I mean.
(While we’re on the topic of Google searches, I would also suggest doing a Google News search for coverage of the Skittles campaign. I was surprised to find that “traditional media” was really quiet on the topic. There were a few articles — one in The Wall Street Journal, for instance — but they essentially stopped paying attention after the Twitter-linked version of the site went live. This is definitely one of those stories where blogs are hands-down doing it best. I haven’t found a single “real” news story mentioning the move by Skittles from Facebook to Wikipedia.)
For those of you who are just stumbling upon this now, check out our posts about the Skittles social media campaign from Tuesday and Wednesday which provide background and (in our humble opinion) some analysis worth reading about the implications for youth marketing and the Gen-Y set. Oh, and as always, let us know what you think about this new development. You’re going right now to write on Skittles’ Wikipedia page, aren’t you?
Another day, another development in the much-discussed Skittles campaign put together by the globe-spanning Agency.com. (For those of you who need to get up to speed, check out yesterday’s post which details its roots.) Today, when I directed my web browser towards www.skittles.com, I was expecting to see the Twitter feed that has garnered so much attention. Instead, gone was the Twitter feed, and in its place appears Skittles’ Facebook fan page.
Some have suggested that this redirection towards Facebook was a result of some nasty comments that found their way into the Twitter stream. Other marketing wisemen and wisewoman (YMC included) see this as a well-timed move to keep the buzz machine rolling. Remaking your homepage in the form of a Twitter stream is innovative, but the shock value is short lived. By transforming the campaign just a few days in, Skittles is maximizing the media attention. If they made the change three weeks from now, once everyone (and their marketing-savy mother) had heard about the campaign, we would all respond with a collective shrug. Oh, neat. But by making a radical shift in the middle of the media frenzy, they guarantee another round of articles and blog posts (not unlike this one) calling out the campaign and sparking new discussion. And even the dissent, and their has been a fair amount of it bubbling up around the blogs, is ultimately a win. People (just like us) are engaging in a lively chat — and Skittles is undeniably at the center of it.
It’s worth mentioning a word about the implications of the Facebook specific strategy, as well. As of this writing, the Skittles fan page has 588,466 Facebook users that have signed up to be “fans” of the brand. Just like that, Skittles has half a million (likely majority Gen-Y) Facebookers, which they can reach out to in a number of interesting ways. A few months from now, I would not be surprised to see Skittles leverage that fan group to create some attention-getting digital campaigns that allow users to interact with the brand. (Think along the lines of Burger King’s Facebook campaign.)
And, mark my words, that fan page is going to be three times larger before this story has died down. Because remember: every time a Facebook user joins the fan page, their decision to join that group is reported in their “News Feed.” While this may sound insignificant to those who don’t live this stuff everyday, the implications are huge. Presence in their personal News Feed means that all of their friends have a chance to see that they’ve joined, and many will, at the very least, check it out for themselves. This is why Facebook is so powerful. It combines the viral power of the internet with what is essentially peer-to-peer marketing.
What are your thoughts on the new developments? I think I’m going to go grab a bag of some delicious rainbow-colored candy.
This happens to me every so often, and when it does, I’m always a little awestruck. It goes like this: It’s nearly noon, I’m trolling the web, hitting my usual list of blogs, sifting through my RSS reader and sending the occasional email while finishing lunch (a superb salad from Chop’t, if anyone’s curious). I consume a lot of content during these casual strolls across the web, and most of it barely registers. I glance over a few lines of text, I smile or furrow my brow, and I move on. In these moments, the fact that 99.99999 percent of the content I take in is free makes perfect sense to me.
But sometimes, like today, I cross something so clear and cogent, that I have to stop and give thanks for the awesome power of the internet. And all of it for free! Oh, world wide web, how did we exist without you?
Without further hyping, I give you the above mentioned clear-and-cogent-thinking-that-made-me-stop-and-think. It’s a short presentation from Shiv Singh, VP of Global Social Media at Razorfish. It’s a genuinely worthwhile look at the evolution of the social networking universe — and what is means for the future of brands. The major take-away may not come as a shock to most. Essentially, Singh echoes what many of us in the marketing universe have been saying of late: that social networking means that communication has to be a two-way street between brands and consumers. It may be an old-news message, but the context Singh provides is really valuable. So read it, and then take its message to heart and start interacting in an authentic way with your consumers.
As you’ve surely heard, social networking’s reigning goliath, Facebook, grew larger and more goliath-like in 2008. It officially surpassed Myspace as the world’s most popular social networking tool in April 2008. Interestingly, much of it’s virus-like growth has taken place abroad. According to Google, Facebook was the single most popular search term in Belgium, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Switzerland — and it was among the top ten most popular searches within every other country Google tracks. Which is, you know, basically the whole world.
As the number of active Facebook users quickly approaches the size of a country of its own, the blogosphere has been overflowing with good demographic data that might be of interest to you all. Our ever-sage friends at iStrategyLabs have an excellent summary here. Forrester Research’s Jeremiah Owyang has a wider social networking survey here. Carolyn Phillips at Millenial Marketing has an analysis worth reading as well.
The quick-and-dirty analysis is simple: Facebook is growing in every conceivable direction. At nearly 60 million active users world wide, we’re all running out of big-sounding adjectives to describe it. With that said, the most rapid expansion is taking place not among Millenials — who are by and large already there — but the parents of Millenials. As more than a few people have noted, Facebook is getting older and grayer by the day.
Although there is much hand-wringing across the blogosphere about the likely reaction from the audience we all watch so carefully — those somewhere along the high school and college continuum — we at YMC are unequivocally confident that, at least for the next few years, Facebook will remain a force in the youth marketing world. (For those who needed a reminder, Burger King reminded us of Facebook’s power just the other day.) For the near future, no doubt, Facebook will continue to be an important arrow in YMC’s quiver — and for all others interested in holistic youth marketing. Of course it’s just as important to remember, however, that social networking is just one of many tools. A good campaign is a holistic one — a campaign that touches young people across a number of platforms, creating true peer-driven brand experiences as it goes. It’s our good fortunes as marketers to live in a world where this can be accomplished in so many different ways.
