Four Classic Campaigns Whose Hits Keep on Coming
It is a delicious irony that the online marketing world, renowned for allowing advertisers to create campaigns at lightening speed, is now responsible for keeping those campaigns around far longer than ever before.
Stuart Elliott of The New York Times writes:
“The ongoing online presence for ads is different from how campaigns conclude in the traditional media, when television commercials and print advertisements cease appearing or billboards and signs in stores are taken down.”
He cites a number of campaigns that have remained online for years, among them, Burger King’s breakthrough “Subservient Chicken,” originally created six years ago this month and still on the company’s website, and CareerBuilder’s tongue-in-cheek “Monk-e-mail,” launched as part of an ad campaign featuring chimps in 2005 and still available today. In fact, the Monk-e-mail service clocked over 800,000 visits in the first three months of this year.
Who would have thought that the Internet, which by its very nature is fleeting, would actually increase the longevity of ad campaigns? But it’s true. Adi Seidman, CEO Oddcast, the agency that created Monk-e-mail, tells The New York Times, “We talk less about campaigns now and more about programs that can be ongoing and serve a client year-round.”
From my years of experience in the ad wars, I can tell you that I always shook my head in disbelief when ad agencies and their clients not only changed campaigns, but came up with an entirely new strategic direction, every year or, absurdly, every quarter. Clients were always looking for the next great creative approach, and agencies were only too happy to oblige and line their pockets with new infusions of billings.
As Marcel LeBrun, CEO Radian6, told The New York Times,
“If marketers are striving to “build and foster a community of advocates,” they ought not be like “politicians who go online around election time and then disappear after the election.”
Timeless campaigns are few and far between, but they do occur now and then. Take Volkswagen, for example. It was wildly successful for a decade with its “Drivers Wanted” campaign. In fact, by its second year the campaign had outpaced (pdf) sales projections by 86,000 vehicles. Of course, the focus quickly changed when a new agency won the account. Below is the original ad from 1995. The quality of this copy is a bit grainy but if you watch it the messaging and the music is still very effective.
A more recent example is E*TRADE’s “babies” campaign. While the talking babies may get on your nerves, they have been running since the 2008 Super Bowl, differentiating the company from any other broker. Has E*TRADE extended the babies campaign to online media? You bet. All of the ads are on the company’s website, along with “Baby Mail” (also created by Oddcast). The ads have generated more than 19 million YouTube views. The E*TRADE Baby Facebook page has more than 12,000 fans. The baby has more than 3,000 followers on Twitter. This kind of media saturation would never be possible if it weren’t for the Internet.
So I, for one, like the idea that advertisers can archive advertising on their own websites, YouTube, Facebook and the like. It gives them the ability to cheaply extend the lives of ad campaigns. And it proves once again why Internet marketing is so valuable and flexible a weapon in the modern-day marketer’s arsenal. Now if only more advertisers were savvy enough to realize that they don’t have to reinvent the creative wheel every few months once they have the message right.
