I have waited for months now to write a post with that title and when I saw a campaign that Nissan ran recently I found the perfect excuse. In short to promote their new car, the Cube in their words "they avoided the usual mainstream quadrangle of TV, radio, print and billboard to trumpet their car launch" and instead used a social media led campaign targeting the creative classes to spread the word.
According to Jeff Parent, Nissan Canada's vice-president of sales and marketing "The creative class is what's motivating everything these days they are the ones that other people coalesce around. Creative people make their art to infect others. For us, it was a natural fit."In short five hundred finalists were assigned a blank webpage on Nissan's hypercube.ca website and invited to creatively "audition" for their chance to win a free vehicle - one of the winners award winning Canadian artist Greg Sczebel ended up generating more than 4,000 votes and 21,000 profile views.
So what is the point in the title ? - well the point here is not the campaign - it is not particularly innovative or different - but rather that a huge company chose the launch a new car in this manner and spent (according to them) a third of the amount they would normally would for a car launch of this type as PHD's Rob Young says "The thinking here is that you could spend $5 to reach 1,000 people in a TV commercial at a relatively low level of involvement, or spend $5 reaching 10 people at a high level of involvement. The high level of involvement – if you get the right consumers – is a better payback." My issue is that that this is not a UK based campaign (it is from Canada) and it is by no means normal and the reason is not because of agencies not presenting these ideas (I am convinced that any agency worth its fee will be pushing social media activation wherever relevant) but rather that Clients at best do not understand the opportunties afforded by this approach or at worst are not willing to embrace the myriad of opportunties that are available in the new media landscape and "think outside the cube"
So the conclusion has to be fairly aimed at Clients to raise their game - and the although the risks are high so are the rewards, as Ice T says in the aforementioned song "If you out for mega cheddar, you got to go high risk" but I am sure the rewards will be worthwhile.
The key challenge is to encourage clients (& particularly their boardroom colleagues) to reframe their expectations when it comes to the numbers. Rob Young makes a fair point about how spending $5 to engage 10 people can be more valuable than spending $5 to simply reach 1,000, but to a client used to dealing in millions of ratings and cost per thousands in the pence, this can be a tough argument to win.
I would add to Martin's point that the ability to track through to conversion is the key to winning that argument. In this case a car launch first needs to generate awareness and it would be interesting to see if data is available to show how much noise was generated, and to what audience - this allows a comparison to be made. I suspect that, as ever, it will become a debate about having the courage of one's convictions that the right segments have been identified, and spoken to in a medium and manner they find acceptable.
Andrew Roberts
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Member since: 03 Jun 2008
Last login: 17 Nov 2009
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