Eric Leist » messaging

Old Spice Embodies New Trends in Social Media

Eric Leist — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 23:37:48 +0000

If you’ve spent any time on the Internet this week, you seen the Old Spice video responses campaign marathon. It’s a marketing ploy so invasive, it’s incredible; so unbridled, it’s unnerving. The brand’s YouTube channel now hosts almost 200 videos, most of which are customized responses to brand mentions on Twitter and YouTube video comments featuring Isaiah Mustafa, the actor and current face of Old Spice. Is this a showcase on the future of conversational marketing, or is merely testing the limits of how much we love when comedy covers stabs at our privacy? It might be both.

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 W eiden + 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

Diving down the 3D Rabbit Hole

Eric Leist — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 04:48:23 +0000

This week, I saw my first 3D movie. For a while, I’ve been curious about how the whole 3D media experience is going mainstream. At the consumer electronics show in January, 3D TV was all the rage. In the past two years, 3D has been coming to movie theaters.

Up until this week when I saw “Alice in Wonderland,” my 3D experience was limited to 10-minute theme park shows like the “Muppets 3D” in Disney’s MGM/Disney Studios park and “Honey I Shrunk the Audience” in Epcot Center.

Needless to say, the 3D in theaters today is far superior to the 90s technology in the Florida theme parks. The question has been burning in my mind: Will 3D become the norm for visual media?

When color television first arrived on the market, many people didn’t want to pay for the new color TVs and rationalized that they didn’t need to be shown what colors a baseball field was. Eventually, however, the price for color technology declined, and color television became the norm. Movies like the “Wizard of Oz” hinged on the color aspect. Think about how much more powerful and enjoyable that movie is in color versus what it would have been in only black and white.

I think we’ll see the same predictors for the future of 3D:

Affordability – Right now it is much more expensive to watch a movie in 3D. Like all technology, however, those prices will decline.

Dependability – By this term, I mean how much media content depends on the 3D feature. What will be the “Wizard of Oz” of 3D? Will directors and producers figure out how to make movies and television shows use 3D in a way that transcends the “cheap 3D tricks” we see today? Movies and TV need to depends on the 3D features

Development of a norm - There’s a catch-22 here. The first two points depend on 3D becoming widely accepted not just as a fad, but as a norm. Consequently, the norming of 3D depends on affordability and dependability.

Where will we see 3D develop into a necessary feature? Horror movies and thrillers? Sports? Fantasy?
Perhaps we’ll just have to take the plunge down the 3D rabbit hole to see what happens next.

District 9 Movies Rolled Into 1!

Eric Leist — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:56:09 +0000

This week, I went to see “District 9.” After reflecting on it for a bit, I saw that the movie’s downfall has some valuable lessons about the unity of messaging. It’s failure to appeal to a single mass audience by blending different movie making styles provides further evidence for the need to segment audiences.
Synopsis
(I’ll try to do this without giving too much away, though I wouldn’t recommend this film to anyone who isn’t a blood relative of the cast members.)
District 9 chronicles the story of a government agency’s attempt to relocate over a million aliens living in a fenced-off district near Johannesburg, South Africa. We follow Wikus, a well-meaning and naive agent heading up the operation. The film documents the historic removal of the alien mothership and the events leading up to it.
What’s wrong?
The movie has multiple personality disorder. It begins as a documentary, sprints into an action film, flirts with being a love story, and then jumps back to documentary-style. At first, I thought this movie was going to provide a thoughtful commentary about who we are and how we treat each other. It changes its mind away from that goal about 20 minutes in, though.
So what?
Some people like mockumentaries. Some people like action. Some people like both. The lesson learned is that you can’t mix and match elements of different previous successes to create your own. That’s what “District 9″ tries to do, and it fails. It is the result of too many creative people sitting in a room dreaming up a screenplay without a down-to-earth realist to keep things in balance. Is it entertaining? Yes. Are the special effects great? They’re spectacular. Does it deserve to be at the top of the box office? Sure. But it will be soon forgotten; stashed away from movie greatness with the likes of “Cloverfield” and Spielberg’s “AI.”
What if…
The movie got me thinking about what it would be like to release several cuts of the same movie. What if “District 9″ came out as one cut true to the documentary-style through and through and was showing in the theater next door as the action movie. Like the college website that has different landing pages for different audiences, (students, parents, athletes, alumni, etc.) what if “District 9″ created the same story with different genres to appeal to different crowds. Might the movie be just as significant? Maybe. Might it make more money as well? Possibily. I would pay to see both versions after seeing the first one. I suspect others might too.
I’m not trying to change the movie industry here, I’m just asking “what if?”

Who Let the Dog Out?

Eric Leist — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:07:27 +0000

Michael Vick has been on a short leash since his meeting with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell a few weeks ago. He was released from prison last month after serving a two-year sentence for running a dogfighting ring. Looks as if he will be “fighting” his damaged reputation for a while.

This story reminds me of a lecture from last semester’s PR class on image restoration. At the time, we were discussing how Michael Phelps’ publicist could boost his popularity back from the bong-gate scandal.

I stumbled across an article on Vick last night that struck me.

Apparently, Vick spoke to Atlanta-area youth about the devastating effects of dogfighting. However, very few members of the media were allowed inside to hear Vick speak at the community center.

The PR choice is obvious: Get Vick involved with the community, but keep him out of the limelight. Do Vick’s people think he’s had enough spotlight for the time being? Are they trying to keep him on the down-low? Vick is going to do a “60 Minutes” special interview soon, so what’s the point of keeping his community work a secret?

They’re the professionals, not me. I’m just curious to see what the next move will be. Vick’s mentor Tony Dungy said tonight that Vick will likely have a home in the NFL within the coming week so this story is far from over. I’ll be wagging my tail in excitement waiting to hear what happens next.