Scattered Brilliance
From my brain to paper (or pixels as the case may be)Archive for youtube
More on the Dunk Contest
I am fascinated with the YouTube promotion of the dunk contest, as previously covered here and here. But I wanted to pull in a little more context.
Rudy Gay’s initial video has been viewed over 1,600,000 times in the past two weeks generating over 2,200 comments and nearly 200 video responses posting dunks that he should try out.
Now that’s viral marketing the way it should be done in the interactive space. The NBA, Sprite, and YouTube combined to deliver a campaign that captivated an audience and built a platform for interaction that has tremendous opportunity for payoff during NBA All Star weekend.
Well done.
Jamario Moon wets our whistle on YouTube
The NBA dunk contest will be relevant again this year and it might be grass roots build up on YouTube that pushes it back there. It started with Rudy Gay calling out to the community to help choose his dunk (which I covered here). And there have been top ten dunk video montages put together and circulated for each of the four contestants;
– Gerald Green, Minnesota Timberwolves (Defending Champion)
– Dwight Howard, Orland Magic
– Rudy Gay, Memphis Grizzlies
– Jamario Moon, Toronto Raptors
But I stumbled on the icing on the cake today thanks to the community over at Yardbarker in Jamario Moon’s teaser video for a dunk that will knock your socks off.
Moon, an ex-Harlem Globetrotter who has a growing following of NBA faithfuls, shows off his stuff in a YouTube promo. Stick around until the end for the cliffhanger, it’s a little staged and cheesy, but totally worth it!
In case you missed it, here’s a screenshot of where Moon took off from for his two handed jam.
That’s just sick! The only way he could top that would be to pull an “Over the Moon” and dunk over himself!
I haven’t been this excited for a dunk contest in a long time. It’s about time the NBA made this hyphy again.
H&R Block YouTube campaign gone bad.
When the marketing team at H&R Block put this campaign together, I don’t think they envisioned having to leave a comment like this in the comments of that same campaign;
“Hey there YouTubers. I’m the director of online marketing for H&R Block’s digital tax solutions. I appreciate your comments about transparency and I want to let you know that I couldn’t agree more. I thought we were pretty overt about making it clear that Truman was our creation and not a real person. The thought that anyone might think we were trying to pull one over on you makes me ill. Not the intention at all. So if you feel we led you astray, I sincerely apologize.
Truman is just our way of acknowledging that no one really wants to think about taxes and that we really have to go out on a limb to get anyone to pay attention to a (not very sexy) subject that could actually have a big impact on your pocket book.
Thanks for your Comments!
-A”
Wow, reading that again three thoughts cross my mind.
(1) The campaign missed the mark. The more you watch the fictional Truman, the more you actually like him. But the first impression I got was confusion over who Truman was and why he was talking to me on YouTube. I figured it out pretty quickly, but I immediately wrote him off.
(2) I feel terrible for “A” over at H&R Block. They clearly put creative effort, thought, and resources against this campaign. This response clearly wasn’t what they expected. Talk about having to eat crow.
(3) I give “A” a tremendous amount of credit for stepping up and joining the conversation around this campaign. I would encourage them to post a video response and to find a way to capitalize on the humor that lies underneath their character Truman.
New “conversational marketing” is a tricky space. I think the lines of content and advertising is often close to being crossed. I also think that the audience within many of the new media and social networking worlds are much more fickle and cynical towards advertising. If it doesn’t add value or if it’s “lame”, you run into situations like this.
It’s interesting. If this campaign ran on TV, would H&R Block have ever known if their character was resonating or not? If “Dude, your getting a Dell Steven” was a YouTube creation would he have been similarly dismissed as a “gay capitalist creation?
We are in a new world of marketing. One that is transparent both ways. Marketers must be transparent to consumers, because consumers won’t pull any punches with their views back.