Marketing magazine named VCCP creative agency of 2009, with their most famous campaign of the year being the creation of Aleksander the meerkat for shopping comparison site Compare the Market. This campaign is a rare example of using entertainment to sell AND create online buzz. Most attempts at creating viral advertising end up being what we call "sponsored entertainment": funny films paid for by the brand.
[For non-UK readers, Aleksander is a toy meerkat who tells people to avoid the mistake of going to comparethemeerkat.com if they want to get cheap insurance. You can see an ad here, or click below if you are on the blog].
Here's why I like this:
1. Boosting the bottom line: the results from the Aleksander campaign are pretty amazing: 400% increase in web traffic and 73% decrease in cost-per-acqisition. Here's what I think has worked well:
2. Really understanding growth drivers: Aleksander really helps sell more stuff (SMS). His whole job is to hammer into your brain the domain name comparethemarket.com. By helping people remember this and type it into Google directly, it helps dramatically drive down cost. The company doesn't have to pay for people searching for comparison services and then clicking on pay-per-click links.
3. A character with legs: not physically, but in marketing terms. The agency have created a character that manages to add some emotional "sizzle" to what is a pretty dull category. He really has appeal, and so generates free marketing for the brand. Aleksander's Facebook page has over 600,000 bloody friends! And hundreds of people bother to comment on his posts. Amazing. Also, there is a whole website for people who for fun do type in comparethemeerkat.com ! And the ad has almost 250,000 views on YouTube, four times more than another comparison site using entertainment (of a sort) to sell: GoCompare.com
In conclusion, entertaining people can work for your brand, provided this is focused single-mindely on selling more stuff. Don't get seduced by trying to "add emotional appeal" to your brand in this way. This is a means to end, not an end in itself.
/ I strongly rmeoemcnd that you turn the No Follow off in your comment section.I'll watch Google Webmaster Tools, and if the links don't show up after a couple of weeks I won't go back to that blog again.Another suggestion: you should have a Top Commentator widget installed.Do Follow and Top Commentator will ensure that you have a successful blog with lots of readers!
Posted by: Soumen | May 29, 2012 at 01:26 PM
Business Coach does many of the same things, but in a way that is focused on creating a successful business.
Posted by: Business Coaching | February 18, 2011 at 12:38 PM
the world of entertainment so much since the appearance of the mass media in early 10's
Posted by: cheap soft cialis | April 08, 2010 at 04:34 PM
Watched an interesting presentation by the team behind this at the 140 conference in London and their biggest problem was dealing with the volume of interest especially at the weekends when Alexander had to take a little time "off twitter etc". The fact that everybody over here in Ireland knows about the campaign shows just how succesfull it was and how these sorts of things can cross borders now thatnks to online channels
Posted by: Niall Harbison | January 01, 2010 at 06:20 PM