The idea is not anything new.

Remember the viral video sensation of 2007? Two kids made a YouTube video of a glitch in an EA Sports Tiger Woods Pro Golf video game.

EA responded with a YouTube video that ran on television as an ad with a claim that there was no glitch; that Tiger Woods was actually was good enough to walk on water. The video received almost five times as many views as the user-generated parody:

Wheat Thins will hunt you down

Last month, Wheat Thins started hunting down Twitter users who comment about the the popular crunchy product. The Wheat Thins squad physically tracks down the people in their homes or when they’re out at a restaurant leaving one victim bewildered, glancing nervously at the cameras and wondering aloud, “Don’t I have to sign something?”

The Old Spice campaign is no doubt miles ahead of other viral marketing attempts. Take a look at Visible Measures’ statistics from the video series’ first few days:

To me, this campaign was really eye-opening. It signifies two major trends happening in the new media world right now:

1) A business-driven convergence of popular social media platforms.

Think back to 2009. Which two emerging trends went crazy that year? Twitter usage was the biggest upward trend. The other was online video, which, with the help of Hulu, took huge strides.

2) Advertising taking some control over social media

The Old Spice campaign was organized by Weiden + Kennedy, and it was an aggressive move from the advertising firm. Having graduated from Boston University with a PR degree, I’ve been told PR departments should control social media. Now, I’m being exposed to some different points of view. While I still think PR skills (notice I didn’t say “firms”) are best to handle day-to-day “conversation management,” I’m seeing advertising disciplines (again) taking the lead in creating social media campaigns.

If you want to read more about the Old Spice campaign, see the following articles:

http://mashable.com/2010/07/15/old-spice-stats/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1295266/Old-Spice-adverts-masculine-ever.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

I decided to give it a shot. If you’ve been seeing me tag some recent tweets with “[sponsored],” that’s why.  So far (after two sponsored tweets) I’ve made $1.12! Not much money, but it’s more than the usual $0 my other tweets make. If you want to join, they gave me a referral link:

Anyway, here’s the feature I wrote:

Media Type

MyLikes is a hybrid of earned and paid media. There’s a small part of it that’s paid media because the advertiser controls where sponsor links lead. It’s earned media because since every member can only promote one paid link per day, the advertisers are competing for relevancy and product or service superiority. That competition is happening in the earned media/social media space.

Description

MyLikes pairs advertisers with influencers and allows those influencers to promote links and get paid by the click. It’s affiliate marketing gone social. I’d argue it’s an improvement on affiliate marketing because it focuses on relevance. There should be no surprise that it was founded by a former Google product manager and a former Google engineer.

MyLikes is an open social network. Members build profiles and establish interests by promoting or “liking” products and services. There is a selection of sponsored links they can choose to promote on various social networks, but they are only allowed to promote one of those per day to prevent users from spamming. MyLikes works with advertisers to match the best influences with their marketing needs, and those advertisers invite the top targeted users to promote their products. The member revenues flow into a PayPal account.

Content Flow

Content surrounding MyLikes is cyclical. The advertisers create landing pages and then buy clicks to those landing pages. The MyLikes members choose which links to promote and create content (which can be positive or negative) to frame the link within a certain context. Users who click on the links from MyLikes members through Twitter or Facebook are then taken to the landing pages.

What’s Valuable

MyLikes connects advertisers with influencers. There are a ton of people who have built up a following online for whatever reason: their video blog (about beer), their personality, or the cool stuff they do with their business. An endorsement from those influencers could be more valuable than paid media or owned media because of the simple fact that people listen to people. They are increasingly skeptical of brands. That’s part of the reason why I believe the future of marketing lies with people; not with brands pretending to be people. MyLikes also just secured some Seed funding this month. Robert Scoble also jumped onboard as an advisor, so it seems the folks at MyLikes are truly living their brand.

When I see the ads for Go Daddy, I’m bewildered at the company’s success. Somehow, Go Daddy managed to become the world’s largest domain registrar. You would never know that from its advertisements, though. Their strategy is strictly to get customers (and/or horny men?) to visit their homepage, effectively branding the site into their customers minds for when they eventually need a domain name.

The commercials never give any reason why Go Daddy is better than competitors. They never bring in celebrity endorsements—unless you count a showering Danica Patrick. The company forgoes everything that has ever been discovered about conventional persuasion and skips right to the sex appeal. In fact, most of the commercials don’t say what the company does at all!

We in the Internet marketing/PR world argue against the effectiveness of paid advertising. So how is it that these commercials—some of them banned–have helped drive Go Daddy to the top of its respective industry? Well, I’ve heard the three most powerful brands around are the words “free,” “sex” and “Harvard.” Well, if the GoDaddy.com advertising approach over the past four years isn’t evidence of that, I don’t know what is.

Here are my thoughts on some television ads I’ve seen recently – one good, one bad, and one just plain ugly.

The Good:

A simple and humorous juxtaposition makes this ad one of the best on television. The message: “Heineken beer is as exciting as a walk in closet.” The ad delivers the message in the one swift cut to the men. But what pushes this advertisement to a higher achievement reached by most beer commercials is the product resonance. The signature Heineken green shines in stark contrast to the white lights. This is not one of those “funny beer commercials.” It’s a funny Heineken commercial. Great branding, great message, great delivery.

The Bad:

My roommate pointed the error in this commercial out to me a few weeks ago.
He said, “I don’t know about you, but I kind of want software that requires a higher level of thinking than a 4-and-a-half-year-old can manage.”
While Microsoft’s decision to market their simplicity is attractive to a lot of people, those people are not digital natives, so they aren’t the future. Microsoft makes a mistake with this ad by placing themselves as the industry leader of the past. Eventually, the demographic of people who want to upload a photo with software that has only simplistic, primitive features will die out and leave behind the younger demographic now with the impression that Microsoft makes only basic software not suitable to their needs.

The Ugly:

Does the song get stuck in your head for weeks? Yes. Does that mean people subconsciously want to buy fish sandwiches? I’m not sure. It didn’t have that effect on me. I can’t really pick out the intended message in this commercial. And to be honest, all I can think about when I watch it is how nasty the last Filet-O-Fish I had was.

Agree? Disagree? Still singing the fish song? Other favorite or not so favorite ads?