Reading and YouTube

I never thought I'd hear the two words together - but the National Year of Reading has developed a series of YouTube videos to promote reading amongst young people. The videos are based around a series of dares designed to promote information retrieval in the form of reading. It's interesting to see the government using YouTube in this way.

As I said, I'd never have put "reading" and "YouTube" together - however it seems to work quite nicely. The main driver of the films seems to be charismatic presenter Garron, whose enthusiasm pushes the films through making them feel like a "Why don't you" for the naughties . . .

Drug mule dogs and speaking baggies

FRANK, the drugs information and advice service, has launched a campaign raising awareness about the risks of cocaine use with a bang.

This year a fully integrated on & offline campaign incorporates a whole host of digital content, featuring videos narrated by, amongst others, a fatally wounded drug mule dog called Pablo and a talking bag of cocaine.

Our team's been tasked with distributing this online content  to drive high-levels of awareness across the net amongst FRANK's target for this campaign of 15 to 18 year olds.

In total there are four pieces of content to seed: two specially commissioned online clips - a cryptic teaser and a viral - which complement the TV spot and another film highlighting the darker side of cocaine.

We've gone for a two stage strategy.  We kicked the campaign off earlier this week with an exclusive pre-launch preview of the teaser and viral films to a discrete audience of culturally relevant bloggers (e.g. DJ / music blogs), and then yesterday, as the full campaign officially launched, we pushed the button on a blanket seeding strategy intended to generate high-levels of awareness quickly.

So far the strategy seems to be working with some good early advocacy for the campaign amongst the blogger community, and a good early surge in views of the campaign videos.

See the viral here: Baggie


and catch all the other pieces of content here: FRANK Cocaine YouTube channel

Name a viral product?

I'm putting together a list of viral products.  By viral products I mean products that require little marketing spend because (like Eastenders) every one's talking about it.

Here's the start of my list:

- In Rainbows - (Radiohead's latest album)
- Moo cards (moo.com)
- Eglu
- The Hulger phone
- Million Dollar Homepage
- iPod
- Hotmail.com (old)
- Google.com (old)
. . .

If anyone's got any more viral products to add - then please help me and add them below.  Having established a nice long list, I'm then going to be looking at what each of the products has in common . . .