Internet Marketing Blog

Dakota County YouTube Video PSA Contest

I've been helping out on a YouTube video PSA contest project that is sponsored by the Dakota County Public Health Department, called Respect My Ride. The purpose of the campaign was to encourage Dakota County teens to pledge to keep their cars smoke-free.  The video contest encouraged teens to create a 30-second public service announcement promoting the same message.

In addition to YouTube, the campaign made use of Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr in in trying to reach teens. The contest winners were announced yesterday. The remarkable explosion of creativity that social media has unleashed never fails to amaze me. This project was no exception.

The following playlist includes all the entries to the contest (the first three are the winners, in order):

Citizen Branding On The Campaign Trail

The viral videos just keep coming for Barack Obama. The most recent is Baracky: The Movie in which Obama and Clinton are injected into the storyline of the movie Rocky, to amusing effect. This is another example of candidate branding by someone other than the campaign iteself.

By inserting Obama into the Rocky roll, he is being portrayed simultaneously as the challenger and the champ. In the movie, Rocky plays an upstart but everyone knows he ends up as champion. It's a nice bit of work:

Online Branding In The 2008 Presidential Race

The 2008 presidential race has been called the YouTube election and that is certainly hard to dispute. There have been numerous examples of YouTube videos playing a significant role in the race for the White House.

In each instance, the YouTube videos attempted to brand a candidate one way or another and to varying degrees of success.

Pre-YouTube

The first instance of YouTube-like online branding of a politician in Minnesota, and, perhaps, nationally, occurred during Norm Coleman's 2002 campaign against the late Senator Paul Wellstone.

At the outset of Coleman's challenge against Wellstone, a couple of young Minnesotans launched the now defunct BushBoy.com that featured a hilarious Flash animation depicting Coleman as George W. Bush's lapdog and, literally, hand puppet. The animation used actual clips of Coleman speeches and played on Coleman's close relationship with the White House. I cannot, unfortunately, find the actual animation. The site was instantly popular. It worked so well because the piece exploited some essential truths of Coleman the politician: He was handpicked by Karl Rove to run against Wellstone and he had big monied supporters.

BushBoy.com was followed by JibJab during the 2004 presidential election with a Flash animation that lampooned both George W. Bush and John Kerry. Again, the satire was so effective because it absolutely nailed if not essential truths, then perceived truths of both candidates:

YouTube Politics

Prior to YouTube, you had to be pretty motivated and needed not just some technical expertise to create popular online political satire, but enough marketing savvy to build awareness. When YouTube launched in February 2005, it provided an easy way to publish satirical political videos and offered a centralized, ready-made audience for them.

Senator George Allen's Macaca Moment

What's more, YouTube ushered in the era of citizen generated media, offering a platform and an audience for raw video shot by individuals. During this presidential race, that fact played out most prominently when a worker for the James Webb senate campaign caught his opponent, Senator George Allen, using a racial slur when referring to the Webb volunteer.

Allen was considered a front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. The Webb campaign uploaded the video to YouTube and it soon became news, with television reports airing the video itself. The widespread exposure of that video branded Senator Allen as a racist. Subsequent reports of Allen using racial slurs and his awkward attempts at explaining the video simply solidified the perception that he was a racist. Allen lost his re-election bid and, as a result of the video, was no longer a viable presidential candidate.

Rudy Giuliani in Drag

It's an understatement to say that Rudolph Giuliani faced an uphill climb in securing the conservative base of his party during his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Conservatives saw no difference between him and a liberal Democrat. Though Guiliani failed for a variety of reasons, it certainly didn't help his cause when someone uploaded video of the former Mayor of New York in drag and flirting with Donald Trump. The video reinforced Giuliani's brand as a liberal:

Big Mother Hillary

The Obama campaign's mashup of the 1984 Apple Macintosh commercial was effective because for years Hillary Clinton has been pummeled (and branded) by her right wing critics as cold, distant, and a big government socialist:

This is the original Apple commercial:

Which, coming full circle, is based, of course, on George Orwell's novel about totalitarianism, 1984:

The Clinton's Soprano's Spoof

Riffing off the finale episode of the final season of the immensely popular HBO show The Sopranos, the Clinton campaign spoofed the finale with a lighthearted version of their own. This piece was fascinating because people tended to read into it what they wanted to see. Supporters of the Clintons saw it as a laudable attempt to show people Hillary's lighter side. Clinton critics, on the other hand, thought it entirely appropriate that the Bill and Hillary would compare themselves to a crime family. In this case, branding was in the eye of the beholder:

This is the original ending scene from The Sopranos:

Pretty Boy John

The Edwards campaign had to be mortified when a clip of the candidate appeared on YouTube that showed him obsessing over his hair, reinforcing the perception of John Edwards as a pretty boy:

The negative branding from that video was so successful that the campaign felt obliged to address it with a self-effacing video of their own for the YouTube debates:

Mitt's Many Faces

The rap against Mitt Romney has been that he never met a position he wouldn't change, if it were politically expedient to do so. And if you had any doubts, YouTube was there to remind you that Romney once held the polar opposite positions he now holds:

I Got A Crush On My Candidate

Barack Obama has been the biggest beneficiary to date of online branding through YouTube. When Barely Political launched the Obama Girl video, the branding of Obama as a sexy candidate easily took hold because he is a very charismatic man. The video has only been a positive for the campaign:

With the phenomenal success of I Got A Crush On Obama, Barely Political followed up with Obama Girl vs. Giuliani Girl:

Too Hot For Hillary

The Me Too videos followed shortly after the Obama Girl made such a big splash but not always to the benefit of the candidate. Taryn Southern, for example, released Hott 4 Hill, containing a rather obvious lesbian theme:

Huck Me

The Huckabee Girl video mocks Republican candidate Mike Huckabee's belief in Creationism:

Yes They Can

Finally, Barack Obama again benefits from independent online branding with the Yes We Can music video featuring musicians and Hollywood stars singing along to an Obama speech. The video brands Obama as an inspiring, lyrical, poetic speaker. Again, the branding is effective because it's true:

Who Needs Swift Boats?

Forget 527s, the new Swift Boat Veterans are going to be even more opaque than the shadowy groups of elections past. If you like anonymous, unaccountable attack ads, stay tuned to YouTube. We are entering a new era of political campaigns because now, with the ease of YouTube, digital cameras and editing software, one person with a clever idea and some skill now has the power to affect an election.

Google Maps Knows All

A little geek humor. This is a cute, clever and funny short by The Vacationeers about the dangers of Google Street View:

The Evolution Of A Viral Video

In 2005, Sony ran a television ad campaign for their Bravia LCD television display that used bright colored superballs bouncing through the streets of San Francisco, filmed by director Nicolai Fuglsig, and set to José González's song Heartbeats. It is a sight to behold:

The incredible piece took on a life of it's own online and inspired mashups like this one that uses the Battlefield 2 video game:

And a take-off commercial for Tango Clear:

To, finally, a political protest by an Italian artist (don't artists pride themselves on their originality? Just asking.):

What If God Had A MySpace?

Here's a very funny Friday video for you that ponders the profound question  (with a nod to Joan Osborne), what if God had a MySpace?

Roger Clemens Posts Steroids Denial On YouTube

Major League Baseball pitcher Roger Clemens has posted a video to YouTube denying the Mitchell Report allegations that he was a "juicer." This is a fascinating new tactic for online reputation management:

An Ode To Digg (And Its Supporting Online Campaign)

Kina Grannis loves to Digg.

  Two Weeks For Kina 
  Originally uploaded by kasuya

She loves to Digg so much, in fact, that she's written a very clever and catchy song about her Digg love. Clearly, Kina's not alone.

But she's taken it another step by entering her song, Gotta Digg, in the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl music video contest. The grand prize winner gets their music video aired during the Super Bowl and gets a recording contract with Interscope Records.

[UPDATE: Two kind readers have helpfully pointed out (see the comments below) that Grannis entered another song to the contest, not Gotta Digg.

I'm a bit disappointed because I really like Gotta Digg, but the fact that she composed that song for her online campaign only makes the campaign itself all the more brilliant!]

Kina's clearly got some marketing savvy in her corner because she's running a pretty sophisticated online campaign to solicit votes for her video.

In addition to asking for votes at her official web site (which is very professionally done, by the way), she has a separate web site for the contest itself: TwoWeeksForKina.com. It is this site that she promotes from her YouTube account and her MySpace page, where she has 2,820 friends and her Facebook page, where she has 850 friends.

She's hosting her contest campaign photos at her Flickr account , where, as of this writing, her 93 contest campaign photos have been viewed more than 900 times. Her only slip at Flickr is that she's wearing a Michael Vick jersey. Oops.

Naturally, her video has been submitted to Digg five times and, as of this writing, has been Dugg 10,734 times.

As of this writing, since Grannis uploaded her Gotta Digg music video to her YouTube account on December 23, the video has been viewed 124,234 times, boasts four out of five stars from 1,438 raters, has been marked as a favorite video by 729 YouTube users, and received 462 comments.

Those numbers are not surprising because the video is number 3 on YouTube's Top Rated Video this week, is the 11th Most Viewed music video this week, and the 42nd Most Responded to video today.

As of this writing, Google Blog Search lists 267 blog posts citing "gotta digg," most of them posted within the past 24 hours. That's pretty remarkable, considering the time period is Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Technorati, meanwhile, lists only 18 posts within it's universe of registered blogs, but among those are highly influential blogs like TechCrunch,  Neatorama, and Buzz Machine. These posts are likely to inspire many more posts about the video down the long tail.

Kina Grannis is either one Internet savvy kid or she's got some very smart online marketers working on her behalf. Regardless, I would not be surprised at all to see her win the contest.

Oh, yeah; here's the video:

Identity Theft: Facebook Face/Off Spoof Video

Since Facebook is making news this week with Microsoft buying a stake in the social networking service, I thought I'd share this funny and clever spoof of the John Woo 1997 film Face/Off starring John Travolta and Nicholas Cage. The spoof uses the film to address identity theft in Facebook.

Face/Off Trailer

This is the original Face/Off trailer. The film has a ridiculous premise, but I do like it a lot:

Persona Marketing - Marketing Characters Online

Yesterday I discussed the importance of preemptive marketing as a reputation management tactic.

Today, let me address another reputation management tactic that should be considered for within an overall brand marketing strategy: Persona Marketing.

There are several types of personas:

• Celebrities are their own personas and brands
• Consumer products and services that use a character for branding
• Creative intellectual property that contain characters such as novels, movies, and video games

With the exception of celebrities, whose being and persona and brand are one and the same, personas are not actual human beings.

If you, your business, product, or service depends at least in part on a character or persona for brand marketing, you need to consider how to use that persona online.

Celebrity Personas

lindsay lohan
Originally uploaded by elsabet

If you're a celebrity, "your people" should be registering accounts to all the various Web 2.0 social sites if only for preemptive marketing purposes.

Someone, for example, has created a Lindsay Lohan Twitter account and is using it to make fun of Lindsay Lohan's penchant for getting into trouble.

On the other hand, a Steven Wright fan has created a NotStevenWright Twitter account and is using the microblog for posting Wright's one-liners. It's too bad Wright himself hadn't done the same because, with it's 140 character limit, Twitter is the perfect format for promoting the comedian because his jokes are generally within that size limit: "I replaced the headlights on my car with strobe lights. Now it looks like I'm the only one moving."

There are countless personas for consumer products or services but I could find few who were putting those characters to work online in a strategic manner.

Consumer Product/Services Personas

Frito-Lay's Chester Cheetah Cheetos character, for instance, is a natural for a MySpace page. He's a sunglass-wearing cool cat: "It's not easy, being cheesey."

Chester Cheetah could show off his commercials on the videos page; photos on the pics page; and he could blog there as well. If he adopted the MySpace culture, built up his friends list, commented on his friends MySpace pages, shared music, etc., the page could be a powerful platform from which to extend the brand.

But there is no official Chester Cheetah MySpace page. Search for Chester The Cheetah MySpace at Google, and the first link is to a video clip from Family Guy that portrays Chester Cheetah as a bandana-wearing, Rush fan getting his fix.

There is one MySpace user who has adopted Chester Cheetah as his MySpace persona and there is a Chester Cheetah fan group with 162 people.

Chester Cheetah is being appropriated at MySpace but there is no official alternative for people to find or friend.

Last year I wrote in depth about Comcast's online marketing of their spokesturtle personas, Bill and Karolyn Slowsky, that included a YouTube channel for the TV ads, an official web site, and a blog where Bill and Karolyn talked about all things slow.

It's a great example of effective persona marketing online.

The Marlboro Man is not a good fit for MySpace or any other space that is known as an online teen hangout, but I could see him having a blog. He could just talk about the cowboy life and man's men things. He would not even have to mention cigarettes.

Book/Movie/Video Game Personas

Characters from creative works are potentially a very rich source for persona marketing that can help extend the brand online.

I don't know if it is a deliberate, official campaign, but it looks like it could be: Someone has created MySpace pages for all of the major Lord Of The Rings characters. And they are all one another's friends, of course.

The Frodo MySpace page includes this description from the About Me section:

I am Frodo Baggins. Im am a hobbit from the Shire. My best friend is Sam. I am the Ringbearer of the one ring. I had to travled to get to mordor to destroy the one ring. Sam and i must destroy the ring before its to late. Finally we get to mordor and destroy the ring of power. Now everyone can get back to normal. Me and Sam were heros.

Frodo would like to meet "people from Middle Earth" and he has 1004 friends; foremost among them are Bilbo Baggins, Samwise the Brave, Gandalf and the rest.

If this is a case of citizen branding, the citizens have done a great job and have treated the brand well. But citizens will not always be so kind; better to be proactive than reactive.

Gmail - Customer Generated Video

ofIn mid-July Google asked their Gmail users to submit video clips that "all share one element: someone hands the Gmail M-velope in from the left of the screen, and hands it off to the right." Late last month, they released a compilation of the best submitted clips:

Google also mashed up a Google Map with all the submissions:

View Larger Map

This is a fantastic example of citizen marketing through consumer generated media. It is also an illustration of how you can harness the love your customers have for your product or service to create a superb video marketing campaign at little to no cost.

The video was uploaded to YouTube six days ago and has already garnered 2.5 million views.

Is YouTube Wrecking The YouTube/CNN Debates?

The Washington Post reports today that Rudolph Giuliani and Mitt Romney may be backing out of the CNN/YouTube GOP Primary debate. The report says Giuliani is unlikely to participate and quotes Romney dismissing the seriousness of the debates: "I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman."

The reason the two Republicans want to skip the debate probably has more to do with the success of YouTube itself than with the dignity of the debate format.

Search for rudolph giuliani at YouTube and the first link you get is to a video of the former New York city mayor in drag:

A search for mitt romney at YouTube returns a bunch of links to videos produced by the Romney campaign but also a link to a video of the 1994 U.S. Senate campaign debate between Romney and Ted Kennedy featuring Romney expressing views that Republican primary voters could find distasteful and even offensive:

Both videos could easily make it to the debates if hooked on legitimate questions. Romney's video is easy: Because he's expressed views contrary to those he now holds, how are we to believe him? Giuliani in drag could be used in the context of a question about gay rights, an issue Giuliani probably would like to avoid addressing before a Republican primary audience.

Indeed, as two of the most popular presidential campaign political videos on YouTube (the Giuliani video has been viewed more than 373,000 times; the Romney video got more than 162,000 views), their absence from the debate would be glaring.

See also:

• Online Politics & The CNN/YouTube Debates
• The YouTube Debate
• Online Political Advertising

Online Politics & The CNN/YouTube Debates

Watching the CNN/YouTube debate for the Democratic presidential primary candidates on Monday, I thought it was a fairly good format but not quite the populist innovation I was hoping for.  The one thing that struck me from an online politics and marketing point of view, was the candidate's YouTube commercials that ran going into, appropriately, commercial breaks.

With the exception of Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, though some were cute or humorous, all the candidates had the pretty standard boilerplate political TV ads we've come to expect. Only Clinton and Edwards embraced the culture of YouTube.

There are certain communication conventions that have percolated to the surface of the YouTube community to become common practices. Take three prominent examples 1) Webcam commentary where the video creator(s) speaks directly to the camera, 2) mashups, where you take various pictures or video clips and mix them with music or commentary to make an entirely new video, and 3) crowd sourcing, where you ask the YouTube community at large to create a video for you.

John Edwards' campaign produced their own video for the debate with a mashup of the title song from the musical Hair and photos that contrasted images of hair with images of Alberto Gonzalez, President Bush, mayhem in Iraq, and the desperation during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:

The video is very sophisticated in the sense that it addresses an Edwards weakness. Edwards has been criticized as a pretty boy and Democratic primary voters may worry that this presents an electability issue for him. A YouTube video of him combing his hair before an interview has enjoyed more than 825,000 views and not long ago he was in the news for paying exorbitant prices to his hair stylist:

Edwards' ad address the issue, makes fun of himself indirectly, while bringing up substantive campaign issues. It also looks like a YouTube video with it's blurry, over-compressed graphics and using the slide show, photo montage format with nonstandard size photos that leave black bars on the screen.

Hilary Clinton's YouTube ad is the result of yet another campaign contest, this time asking her supporters to create a video for the occasion.  The last time the campaign tried such an approach was when they asked supporters to pick Clinton's campaign theme song. That didn't go so well when supporters voted for Canadian Celine Dion.

But this time, the campaign got a hit. The winner of the contest mashes up "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from the Peer Gynt suites by Edvard Grieg...

...with the iconic placards from Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues...

... right down to the same font:

By using crowd sourcing (a democratic activity, in this case), the Clinton campaign got a video that looks right at home on YouTube, evokes a cultural icon representative of change in the form of Bob Dylan with imagery that touches two generations (the 80s band INXS did a video using the placard theme as well) and echoes the campaign's catchphrase (Ready For Change), addresses specific campaign issues, and ends with a clever tagline that appeals to women.

I have one real criticism about the debate.

I would've liked to see CNN and YouTube use the wisdom of crowds, the Web 2.0 idea that many heads are better than one, by allowing people to vote on which video questions would be used for the debate rather than leaving it up to the news organizations to choose.

Sure, the campaigns would no doubt game the system by having their supporters vote for the best questions for their candidate. And there's no surefire way to prevent people from voting multiple times, though there are restrictions you can implement. But the sheer critical mass of the volume of CNN viewers and YouTube users would no doubt level that playing field.

And, God forbid, foreigners might vote for the questions! But you know what, who cares? It's not like, in this day and age, the rest of the world's perception of or issues with us don't matter.

My hunch is that the most pertinent and pressing issues would rise to the top and the questions would be formed in a manner most people thought would elicit a valid answer.

Finally, I would have really liked to see the candidates fully embrace Open Source Politics by, rather than directing their message at voters, eliciting opinions from voters. I would've liked to have seen one or more candidates use their commercial to ask the viewers and YouTubers for their feedback, for their issues and concerns, and to post them as a video response to that commercial.

By and large, though, the debate was more than a ratings gimmick, it was a step forward in online politics.

All Candidate Commercials For The Democratic Primary CNN/YouTube Debate

Yahoo! & Netscape Get Facelifts

If you hadn't noticed yet, both Yahoo! and Netscape have unvield their redesigned home pages.

Yahoo! is going with the highly customizable, AJAXy Web 2.0 approach.

Netscape, on the other hand, is taking an entirely different approach with their digg-like interface where users can submit news stories and actively promote or demote what stories get top billing. As with digg, this is another potential traffic-driver site.

Customer Service In The Citizen Media Age

This is a cautionary tale.

AOL has a reputation for being impossible to cancel. So in this day and age, you'd think they'd go to hurculean efforts to reverse that negative image. The reason they should go to such efforts began to play out on June 15th. That's the day that Vincent Ferrari posted a long explanation of his exhausting efforts to cancel his AOL account on his blog, insignificant thoughts, complete with an audio recording of the experience.

After posting to his blog, Ferrari told consumer advocacy site The Consumerist about his post and they promptly blogged about it. Ferrari submitted the story to Digg, as well. It got dug and the blogosphere was off and running with the story.

Here's a Technorati chart showing blog posts tagged with the word "AOL" May 24 to June 22. That spike is June 15, the day Ferrari posted. The spikes of June 21 and 22 proably represent mainstream media coverage:

The buzz in the blogosphere lead to calls from the media and soon enough, Ferrari was doing TV interview after TV interview about his expeience. Here he is on the Today Show:

As of this writing, that single video was viewed 100,639 times, saved as a favorite 322 times, and made it to the Most Viewed and Most Discussed pages at YouTube.

AOL quickly issued a statment saying that they do not tolerate such treatment of customers and that the Customer Service Representative in question had been fired, but the damage had been done. The stereotype had been writ large and reinforced dramatically.

Technorati tags: aol customer service | cancelling aol | vincent ferrari | today show

Chevy Tahoe Citizen Marketing Campaign

Last night I got an email from a friend that he'd received from a friend who had entered the consumer generated ad contest by at ChevyApprentice.com and promoted on The Apprentice. The promotion invites you to create your own TV ad for the Chevy Tahoe, using a very slick web site where you can drag, drop, and edit multimedia assets such as video, music, and text to create your ad.

The email, which had originally been posted to a few lefty nonprofit email formus, contained links to spoof or political commentary Chevy Tahoe ads at YouTube, mostly SUV-bashing anti-global warming messages.

Some of them are amusing and some are just preachy. Here are some examples:

What Would Jesus Drive?

W.M.D.

Hosted at the ChevyApprentice.com site:

• You Keep Buying Them

Conventional wisdom seems to be that GM made a colossal mistake with this citizen marketing campaign. Nightline did a segment last night on the campaign that captures that angle:

Adrants makes the point that "if left unedited, [this Chevy Tahoe campaign would be] one of the better consumer-created marketing promotions...If all we saw on that site were glowing praises of the vehicle, the promotion would simply be seen as just another lame attempt at capitalizing on a trend and a giant corporation trying to thrust it's twisted version of reality upon us."

I agree. And it appears that the folks in charge of the campaign anticipated ads that would mock the product. A New York Times article on the campaign quotes  Chevrolet spokeswoman Melisa Tezanos,  saying "We anticipated that there would be critical submissions. You do turn over your brand to the public, and we knew that we were going to get some bad with the good. But it's part of playing in this space."

I think the positives far outweigh the negatives in this case. Think about it. The most biting anti-ads are those that have to do with global warming and the people with whom those ads resonate aren't going to buy a Chevy Tahoe. No way. No how. They'll never be potential Tahoe customers.

I'm more their target consumer. I drive a gas-guzzling Jeep Wrangler, so if I were looking for a new ride, I could be a potential customer. And you know what? I don't appreciate the holier than thous telling me I'm immoral for buying an SUV. I doubt I'm alone. In that sense, these anti-ad might even innoculate Chevy a bit against the anti-SUV sentiment.

On the plus side, GM has garnered a ton of free media from the campaign. A lot more people know there's a new Tahoe out than they did before and if the controversy has piqued their interest enough, they've probably watched it in action.

Even before Chevy has picked the winning ad.

How many times have we read stories about Corporation X sending cease and desist letters over things they don't like. Even if it's begrudging, GM is getting points for not trying to censor the negative ads.

Finally, the campaign has also created a lot of online buzz, with people blogging about it or posting to YouTube.

For an awareness campaign, you can't get much better than that.

Technorati tags: chevy tahoe | chevrolet | chevy tahoe ads | the apprentice | chevy apprentice | citizen media | citizen marketing | consumer generated media | tv ad | television ad | youtube | video | melisa tezanos | new york times | suv | jeep wrangler | gm | general motors | buzz marketing

Webcam Stars - Product Placement At YouTube

Bowiechick is a silly teenage girl who has become an online video  star of sorts. Last