These days our leadership team is wrestling with how to effectively advertise our staffing services. We aren’t alone. Most mid-sized companies are asking the same question – where can we invest advertising dollars that will yield solid, first year returns?
I’m wondering if on-line videos would be a good idea – more on that in a minute.
Advertising in the 1970s. When I headed off to college I wanted to go into advertising. I was fascinated by how businesses attracted customers and created demand for their products. One 1971 television commercial that interested me at the time was this Coke commercial, which was one of the first to use music to sell a product. The song, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” later went up the charts to #5 and was sung by the Hillside Singers, which included Rick and Ron Shaw from here in New Hampshire.
I was fascinated by television advertising and many great ads were done for Proctor and Gamble products. During my senior year in college I made it through three levels of interviews at Proctor and Gamble, but they selected someone else – probably a good decision on their part.
In the 1970s consumers got most of their information from four media sources – newspapers, local radio, magazines (mostly national), and television. So it was fairly simple to advertise and reach your market.
Advertising After 1980. Advertising options exploded in later years – cable television increased channel options to over 100 from 4 channels, new targeted direct mail options increased, numbers of radio stations grew, and niche magazines prospered and expanded.
Then along came the internet and smartphones and now the ways consumers receive information is almost infinite. So today, if you want to reach customers you have to invest in multiple media and increase your frequency of ads – both of which can be expensive and, frankly, like rolling dice at Foxwoods.
Back to Web Videos. The hottest Web video right now is Gentleman by South Korean rapper PSY. (His “Gangnam Style” video is still the most-watched web video of all time.) Gentleman has had over 538 million hits. But the second most popular Web video right now is an advertisement for Evian water called Baby and Me, which has had over 60 million hits. And, as I tweeted this week, this has to be the most “feel-good” commercial of the year – watch it, you’ll like it.
This week I read Advertising Symbiosis: The Key to Viral Videos in Harvard Business Review by Carmen Nobel. In this piece, Nobel asks why one water product video goes viral with 60 million hits and another video from Poland Springs fizzles with barely 500 hits. (I think a video of a cat drinking out of a Poland Springs bottle had as many hits as the ad itself!)
Nobel writes about research done by Thales S. Teixeira. Teixeira’s most significant conclusion is that a video is most likely to go viral when the viewer feels compelled to send it on to friends and family. Nobel writes, “The research shows that if sharing an ad will somehow benefit the sender as much as it helps the advertiser, then the ad might go viral.”
Notes from Teixeira’s Research –
- An on-line video must be entertaining. Consumers “now have all the information they need about new products available online. Now, we want ads to entertain us.”
- Successful viral videos have four elements–
- a. They attract viewers’ attention
- b. They retain attention
- c. They get viewers to share the ad with others, and
- d. They persuade viewers
- Evoking surprise is the best way to attract attention.
- Evoking continuous moments of joy is the best way of retaining attention.
- Viewers want to share videos that might improve their personal reputation and relationships with others. Thus, writes Nobel, “it behooves advertisers to create videos that not only will make the product look good but, if shared, will make the viewer look good, too.”
In the 1980s Oldsmobile ran an ad campaign starring, among others, William Shatner and his daughter. The campaign was called “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile.” It flopped because the new Oldsmobile was pretty much like the old, father’s Oldsmobile. Oldsmobile eventually went out of business in 2004. Consumer tastes had completely changed and Oldsmobile didn’t understand this.
I think Teixeira’s research helps us understand these aren’t our father’s ads we are seeing today. I wonder how we can apply this? Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below.
