Irreverent Thinking

The current experiment of running a (YouTube) video on our site has been met with a mixed response. But it has gone rather viral (in a small way). Frames have been grabbed and photo-shopped by a number of people outside of my immediate network. This made me realise that, in a small way, we had created a viral storm - or a viral storm in a tea-cup as I now call it. These storms are quite interesting as it does drum up interest in our company. Which is a “good thing”.

Those that had a negative view came, primarily, from the “old money” agency economy. The gist of this view was that the “production values were too low”, “you must use an autocue”, “look at better post-production”, “it’s all in the editing”… You get the drift. Interestingly the view was not “the content is rubbish and you are spouting poo” but just that the production value (i.e. the video) was not up to the standard used in a 30 second Guinness advert.

And then on Wednesday I watched Manchester United beat Chelsea in the Champions League and saw an advert for Ford Football. What the hell? Are Ford now manufacturing footballs or are they simply copying Nike’s move into vertical markets?! But I digress. The advert was a series of (low production value) videos shown in a (YouTube style) frame. So maybe it’s true, and shock video has taken over the world. Maybe people simply no longer trust over-produced, over-glossy videos. I somehow prefer the real world version and don’t trust the gloss.

The upshot is that we are going to have a crack at recording more videos for our site, based around environmental and personal information. This forces the production values to be non-glossy, immediate and very relevant. No doubt we will see a polarisation of viewpoints. First one goes up today, have a look and pass a comment. I’d love to hear what you think about this experiment!

The now famous viral explosion of BlendTec’s “Will it Blend” site nicely explains why and how the consumer is taking over the market. Without the use of an agency, or even a marketing department, the founder of the company created a YouTube Channel and started uploading videos of odd things being stuffed into his company’s blenders. It ignited like rocket fuel. The shock video nature of the idea, along with the anti-marketing approach, was summed up in this explanation of how one of the best viral campaigns of 2007 was created:

“Once the concept was determined…..we began to create a strategy about how this should work.

We spent $50 on a white lab coat and a few items to blend, set up the camera and invited Tom to demonstrate some extreme blending. Kels took the footage and created the first episode of Will It Blend along with the music and the basic format. Ray Hansen created the website along with the blog, RSS and the suggestion of what to blend next. Many of the catchphrases simply evolved from the first day of filming. I had determined that the campaign would be called Will It Blend. “Will it blend? That is the question” was an unscripted comment by Tom.”

No agency, no committee, no idea of success (or not). Love it? I do!

It that so unusual? It’s probably rather dependent on whether I go in there a lot, which I don’t. He does, however, know quite a lot about me and stores it away in his memory. From what he said to me he knows:-

1. My favourite drink is Guinness and that’s pretty much all I drink

2. He knows I go on the train to London a lot as I will pop in for a pint on my walk back from the train station

3. He knows I smoke as I have to go outside and will leave my money on the bar whilst he’s pouring my Guinness

4. He knows I am male

Ok, so why the irreverent twitter about my local pub? Well, I was thinking that my company builds websites that learn about its visitors by their behaviour and was this a violation of privacy? The answer is “no”. The local barman sees me coming though the door and sometimes has a pint on the go, he says “hello” and if I’m in a suit and it’s around the time that the London train gets in he will ask if I had a good day in London. What he is doing is improving my experience, he’s treating me personally even though he doesn’t know my name - in fact sharing my name would seem wrong and too personal.

So why aren’t more websites like that? They should learn what I like and slant the content towards my interests. YouTube doesn’t do it; it only shows the most popular and latest videos of the day, which I hardly ever watch, so why waste my time downloading the content on that page - take a leaf out of Google’s book and just show the search bar.

More sites will certainly start to work this way and our new VITES platform certainly lets companies do that - it’s just a matter of time before it becomes the standard way to operate.