HEAD BLOG

Nothing says “I don’t really care” like an e-card. After their initial novelty veneer wore thin, the e-card became confined to businesses  who wanted to trumpet 1) that they can save money by donating to charity but really can’t be bothered 2) that they are now taking a low-carbon approach but really can’t be bothered or 3) that their MD received one from his son (who couldn’t be bothered) and who thinks it represents the future. Of not being bothered.

Just hours after installing the new super one hour photo developing machine, everbody’s grandmother went digital consigning vast towers of squeaky paper and “leather” bound photo albums to the warehouse of oddities last seen in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Suddenly we could all take as many rubbish photos as we liked without some sixteen year old slapping a sticker on our faces telling us to do better.

Websites such as Photobox (Flickr capitalised late on this) sprang up to turn those digital files back into “product” and find a use for all the paper we thought we’d saved.

There are, of course, lessons to be learned from the e-card and the sudden collapse of entire film-to-print industry. We clearly wanted to carry on taking photos and share them with family and friends. We also enjoyed the freedom to “get creative” with our work. Especially when it came to personalisation.

Which is exactly what Moonpig saw and capitalised on to great effect. From out of nowhere came a brand with no real world value. Moonpig just created a great product at the right price and it caught on.

It must have caught the stalwarts of the greeting card industry by surprise. Just as Kodak were caught out by the rapid take-up of digital, so were Hallmark and their heavyweight counterparts. To the outside observer they seemed unfazed by Moonpig’s success even though it was clear from the start that this was an idea which would grow and grow.

Unfazed or calm.

Business strategy is a difficult beast to pin down. Those of us who press our noses up against the windows of other businesses like to weigh in on the decisions made by marketers.

I’m no exception.

Often it’s a good exercise, a sort of what-would-I-do thought experiment that sharpens the mind. Or distracts from real work.

In the case of Moonpig, I’ve often wondered why the big boys didn’t jump all over them immediately. They have the resources to protect their business on and off-line so were they being slow and out of touch with the way the Internet was shaping business or did they have a much larger strategy at hand?

We’ll never truly know of course and perhaps it doesn’t even matter because what they have established looks pretty good. It will appeal to the “rest” of us who are slower to adopt new ideas. Those of us who waited for Boots to begin processing digital films again.

The gut reaction (from what I’ve heard) is that Hallmark were just slow to react, caught with their pants down. And I’d be happy to go along with that if I wasn’t regularly having to think different about what my own industry perceives as good and bad packaging.

Because I don’t think it’s that simple. And thinking like this makes me want to look at things differently.

I can see a good business case for Hallmark waiting. Their name and reputation wasn’t going to disappear overnight and so, if they were fazed by the Internet explosion, it didn’t need to matter too much. They could afford to wait. They could afford to let Moonpig take all the risk, spend all the money and get people used to the concept of ordering and personalising cards online. After all, it’s an approach which works well for Apple who often wait to see how people access new technologies before jumping in and “innovating”.

Hallmark are now advertising on TV. They are doing it in a very “Moonpig” sort of way but with the Hallmark brand. If they go the whole… hog… then they should tie in deals with Boots and use their stores to carry the message back out into the real world where its customer base still live and shop.

Agencies like to draw conclusions between what they do and the value it has to the client. We often use it to justify our existence. Or at least our involvement on a project.

Web and viral advertising make this easy because they come with metrics easily attached. The link between creative and clickthroughs is easy to ascertain. The link between clickthroughs and sales is less easy.

I just watched this viral movie. In some ways it is impressive. Certainly it has had a big budget behind it.

Now, forget about the special effects and whatever you might think of the script. Ask yourself what it is doing for the game. It has had a million views on YouTube. That’s an impressive number. Can’t argue with that. If I had a million people choosing to tune in to an ad I had written I wouldn’t be complaining.

So we have to look at what value it is bringing to the product. Is it helping sell more copies of the game? Is that one million figure a million unique viewers? Does it tell us the viewers were considering buying the game or went on to buy the game? If there was a rise in sales was the data separated out from other marketing activities running simultaneously?

To me, the film seems like a gift to existing users. I’d say that’s a pretty nice thing to do. No doubt the scriptwriter had fun fulfilling a live-action dream too.

All I’m seeing, however, is this quote:

Because of the length of the video, this live-action short makes the potential players and audience connect emotionally with the characters on the game, and that will probably make the chances of them buying the game higher.

And that makes me wary. The length of the video is enough to make potential players connect emotionally? It will “probably” increase purchase? Where’s the link between length and quality (that ought to get the spam bots in a frenzy)?

Of course, I’m looking at this from one side. From the side of someone reading a claim about the benefits of lengthy viral movies. From inside the information could change. It could well be that the sales were delivered and the ad paid for itself. It could be that the project was a longterm, brand building exercise designed to heighten awareness of the brand. It could be that I don’t know the full story. Certainly it is true that the game has achieved great pre-orders but whether that is because of this, it’s hard to know.

But as someone who is often asked to create ideas for this whole viral marketing movement I’m still left asking one thing and the answer isn’t clear:

Why?

UPDATE: Ogilvy.com just posted an interesting post which overlaps my cursory thinking on this (and does a better, more analytical job on an article I was going to write about the whole notion of measurement and what it is actually doing for marketeers).

Earlier this week I wrote a couple of articles (here and here) about Twitter.

They achieved three things:

1) I was followed by @davetrott – we admire his approach to advertising so this is “a good thing”.

2) Our blog traffic increased by around 900%. This is also a “good thing” and shows the degree of influence Dave has as an opinion former.

3) It cheered me up. This is a “good thing” for everyone else in the office.

All in all it shows stuff works.