Category Archives: YouTube

Dec 06 2012
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media strategy, YouTube Quote

As I and many other bloggers and Tweeters have found out to our embarassment and horror, the social internet is a cruel mistress. Good stuff gets noticed and passed on, dull stuff sits there. It is an absolute meritocracy, and all the sponsored tweets in the world don’t change that fact.

 

That’s also what makes the social net a fabulous algorithm for media planning.

 

Buried in an Ad Age piece about Chipotle’s much-awarded “Back to the Farm” spot is a somewhat subversive—and totally brilliant– perspective on buying traditional media in a social-media world. Chipotle’s CMO, Mark Crumpacker, had this to say about why Chipotle, never a big TV spender, took the plunge with this ad:

 

“It’s pretty easy to figure out whether something’s popular before you go and buy media around it,” said Mr. Crumpacker. “It wasn’t as easy before without social media … the plan is to put them out there and see how well they do.”

 

In other words, instead of trying to figure out how many eyeballs you can afford to expose to your ad, and copy-testing the ad itself to see if anyone will remember it, just put the sucker on YouTube. No guesswork, no waste. If it’s good enough to be shared, it’s good enough to be aired.

 

Let @Mikey try it.

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Jun 07 2010
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BP, oil spill, YouTube

No thanks, I’d rather watch grainy video of oil gushing into the Gulf all day long.

I thought my last post would also be my last word on BP’s benighted ad campaign, because it’s hard to have an original take on something that every last man, woman and child on earth think is stupid.

So instead, to take my mind off all the unpleasantness, I YouTubed up an instructional video on fly tying. I’d be walled off from all the noise, in my own fly fishing geekdom, and I’d be safe.

And then I saw this:

Never mind how frikkin’ ridiculous this is. If I wanted to watch BP CEO Tony Hayward lying through his teeth, I don’t need to go on BP’s YouTube site. I can watch the same clip, with better commentary, on Jon Stewart.

No, my question is: How did they find me? And why? It’s like one their tar balls washing up in an Indiana cornfield instead of a Gulf Coast beach. Does BP have so much money to throw at this ad campaign that they can afford to target the most obscure reaches of the internet? Is this ad also appearing on sex dungeon sites? Or Elvis impersonator sites?

BP: go aggregate Liz Cheney’s eyeballs. Leave mine alone!