When Will Marketers Stop Reinventing The Wheel?
Adage has been covering the unfolding of a new Burger King social_media campaign, and I’m pretty surprised. Their covering BK’s new “Whopper Virgin” campaign, which isn’t nearly as salacious as it sounds. Think more back country than back seat. The “first time” they’re talking about is a eating a hamburger.
What is shocking is the generally hit or miss nature of these campaigns. Visible Measures, the company monitoring the metrics of the campaign, says “[It's] tough to tell at this stage if the campaign will take off, but viral placement activity is an encouraging first step in the process.”
The documentary (above), which features bringing the whopper to new cultures, has been uploaded more than 30 times on five different video sites. At least 80% of these placements are user-generated. All together, these placements have received over 130,000 views and more than 450 comments since launching on Monday. No one knows whether it will pick up steam, or fall flat. (One researcher does think he can predict video virality early, however)
It’s a common problem for these types of new media campaigns.
Adam Sarner, an analyst with market research firm Gartner, has projected that “over 75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies with Web sites will have undertaken some kind of online social-networking initiative for marketing or customer relations purposes”. He estimates 50 percent of those campaigns will be classified as failures.
So we’re faced with that classic marketing problem. “I’m wasting 50% of my marketing budget, but I don’t know which half”. Only in this case you do know when you fail, because you know no one is watching and can read the negative comments.
Traditional viral media campaigns have trouble succeeding because:
- They have large upfront costs invested in generating concepts and producing the non-standard creative (application, video, or web property)
- Are non-standard buys (what’s a social media ad unit?)
- Require continuing maintenance
- Have confusing metrics
- Can get out of control
What the industry needs, and what we have been building, is a system that removes this uncertainly. Marketers need:
- Guaranteed metrics
- Campaign standardization
- Control over messaging
Anything less and we’re just re-inventing the wheel. For more information on how SocialMedia handles these goals, contact us.
Tags: advertisers
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