The video comes up on a third-world bazaar. This goofy-looking guy comes in, the music comes up, and he starts doing this goofy-looking dance: arms elbowing out, knees pumping, not much else.
The music is hypnotic, beautiful; the dance cuts from India to Kuwait, Iceland to Korea’s DMZ zone. Soon the screen is filled with fellow dancers, mainly children having a wonderful time. It’s impossible not to smile. By the end, the video has covered 42 countries in 3-second clips, and featured hundreds of goofy, happy, beautiful dancers, including a dog, a seal and some lemurs.
More than 7,700,000 hits and counting. (And a feature article in The New York Times.)
What’s going on here? Just another day on YouTube. And no ad is displayed on the site’s page.
The Rowdy Platform for Web 2.0
Among the various Web 2.0 sites that have emerged over the last few years – characterized primarily by social networking, which encourages widespread user participation – YouTube stands out as the rowdy member of the group.
It’s full of energy, surprises and humor. It’s open to all: it doesn’t prescreen videos. If a video violates the site’s rules (for example, explicit sex or racism), it’s typically spotted by users, reported and pulled. YouTube welcomes the full range of society, from the schlub next door to you who’s videotaping his lawn growing, to top music videos, top movie trailers, any number of ‘Bush moments,’ English-language Al Jazeera, the BBC and the Museum of Modern Art.
YouTube was started by three guys working at PayPal who wanted to post videos online for their friends and couldn’t find a way. Two of them being computer engineers, they developed some software and posted a site. They made it accessible via MySpace, and the site ended up piggy-backing on MySpace’s growth. Sequoia Capital got interested in November, 2005, investing $8.5 million. Google got interested in November, 2006, buying it for $1.65 billion. Since then, YouTube has become increasingly sophisticated, thanks to Google’s deep understanding of software engineering, user needs and marketing technique.
YouTube and Social Marketing
YouTube’s business models are very intricate and carefully thought out. The potential is huge: monthly visits in the first half of 2008 have been estimated to range from 65 million to 82 million. That’s a lot of eyeballs.
The basic model of course is ‘viral marketing’. From the home page onward, the site is continually inviting you to “add friends,” and each video has a “Send video” button. If the video that I send you is good enough, you’re going to send it to a number of friends ... and the exponential viral race has begun.
An entire section of YouTube is devoted to contests, most of them underwritten by major corporations such as Gillette, Microsoft, Kmart, Oreo and Chrysler – not to mention the Democratic and Republican National Committees. These range from the bland (send 1 minute of footage of your favorite Disney Park memories) to the witty: Sprint will pay you $20 – “Sell your loved ones out for cash with blatant product placement!” – to feature their Instinct phone in the foreground of your family videos.
The contests are an ingenious marketing technique, offering real prizes to persuade ordinary people to make the companies’ commercials for them, in the process leading the videomakers to think seriously about the pitch, and to implicitly endorse it to tens of thousands of people.
An ad on YouTube’s home page is estimated to cost $250,000 a day. Sponsors such as Cadillac, Nike, Hancock the Movie and the U.S. Navy pay to post their own videos. One of these worth visiting is Playtex’s “How to Put On a Bra,” a playful demo featuring several women of different ages and ordinary figures demonstrating the procedure; it’s sweet, and funny, and it definitely leaves you with a positive image of Playtex. Add to this thousands of music videos and music trailers, comedians doing their act, and countless amateur videos of such things as runaway beach umbrellas, and you get more than 84 million clips (as of mid-2008).
In a good example of their marketing sophistication, Google is introducing “buzz marketing,” computer algorithms that detect a video’s accelerating visits and reviews, indications that it is about to “go viral,” and use these metrics to market the video to advertisers.
(An interesting political twist to You Tube is the Citizen Reporters who are now out videotaping every political speech and public appearance. These are both amateurs and political operatives working for opponents’ campaigns. Politicians must have trouble sleeping these days, knowing that their next slip of the tongue will be posted on YouTube and viewed by tens of thousands of people.)
What’s In It for You?
YouTube clearly has marketing potential for you, if you use it right. Certainly, the first question for you to answer is, do you have a marketing message that can benefit by viral video marketing?
- Does your product or service have motion and visual appeal? (Flower arranging would; copywriting wouldn’t)
- Can you present your message with feeling? Can you give it emotional appeal? This can be done with humor – many YouTube videos are funny – or with video production value, overall high energy or likeable people on camera.
Today’s inexpensive video cameras, powerful computers and video editing software (such as iMovie in Mac OSX) make it easy to shoot and edit video, so long as you don’t care about professional quality (and many YouTube posters don’t). If you’re out shopping for a camera, make sure it’s compatible with your editing software.
If you pay some attention to how you light your video and how you record sound, your video will look and sound better (eliminate background noise as much as possible). Free music is available online to add to your video’s appeal. Keep it short (3 to 4 minutes is a good maximum) and edit it to be fast-paced.
YouTube makes it easy for you to join and upload video. (About 10 hours of video is uploaded every minute.) Take advantage of YouTube’s social marketing features and start building a network of friends.
With an estimated 84,000,000 videos on YouTube competing for eyeballs and brainwidth, it’s unlikely that new or existing customers or clients will just stumble across your video, so you will need to promote it with an integrated marketing campaign (see sidebar), using techniques such as email blasts, direct mail and press releases. And always include the viral marketing rallying cry: “Send it to a friend!”
NH Craftsmen’s League Uses YouTube
Sullivan Creative, the agency for the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen, has built an integrated marketing campaign for this year’s Craftsmen’s Fair, which celebrates its 75th Anniversary at Sunapee Mountain Resort from August 2 through August 10.
Since the League is always seeking to embrace new media, we created an improvisational video, documenting a progressive crafts project that started with a stick figure created by juried craftsmen Jim Lambert, continued to be created by five other juried craftsmen, and resulted in a fully realized sculpture, named “Rare Bird.” She will be displayed in the Craft Wear exhibit and sold to the highest bidder in a silent auction.
We have posted an edited video of Rare Bird’s creation on YouTube (RareBird). We are driving visitors to the site with an email blast to all League members, and advertisements in regional arts and events publications. Please go look at the Rare Bird video, and then send it to friends.
Other elements of the integrated Fair marketing campaign include widespread print ads, direct mail, regional televison commercials, New Hampshire Public Radio spots, a major online press kit, League website online ticket sales, League sponsorship of New London Hospital Days and the New Hampshire Public Television auction, and onsite participation in the New York Times Travel Show.
In addition, there will be an ongoing blog about goings-on at the fair, posted at www.nhcrafts.org. Visit Rare Bird and our blog, and come see us at Sunapee!
(To see the dance sites referred to in the article, click on "Where the Hell is Matt?". For a little-noticed side of YouTube, click on “70 Signs of Intelligent Life at YouTube.”)
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For information on how we can help you with your next marketing program, contact us at Sullivan Creative or call 617.597.0072.
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