By Thales Teixeira
The footwear industry has traditionally been
a hotbed of memorable advertising, with brands such as Nike and Reebok
spending millions to sign athlete-endorsers and hire ad agencies that
create spectacular TV campaigns. But the approach taken by DC Shoes,
which makes footwear for skateboarders, couldn’t be more different. In
2009 the company began shooting videos featuring its cofounder Ken Block
driving a tricked-out race car around closed-off airports, theme parks,
and even the port of San Francisco. The videos last up to nine minutes
and have almost no talking; the stunt driving is interspersed with
glamour shots of footwear. Instead of buying expensive TV time, DC Shoes
uploads the videos to YouTube. Over the past four years they have
gotten more than 180 million views—and in 2011 alone, sales jumped 15%.
One was YouTube’s most-shared video of 2011; another garnered a million
views in its first 24 hours. Paying online media for this type of
exposure would cost upward of $5 million. Using “lean advertising,” DC
Shoes achieved it for a tiny fraction of that amount.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuDN2bCIyus
Many
other companies would like to mimic this approach. In my research, I
use eye-tracking technology, facial-expression analysis, and lab
experiments to better understand why people choose to view online
videos, what narrative techniques keep them watching, and what features
prompt them to share videos with friends. Since writing about this work
in HBR last year (see “The New Science of Viral Ads,”
March 2012), I’ve received a steady stream of requests from
companies asking: How can we put that research to use? As a result, I’ve
been studying how companies create and distribute online video
advertisements, and I’ve examined some of the new firms that specialize
in helping them do so. I’ve found many examples of companies that have
produced effective campaigns for 10% or even 1% of what they would have
spent on traditional ad agencies and paid mass media.
Lower
cost isn’t the only reason to consider online video. Because of channel
surfing, DVRs, and the growing use of “second screens” (mainly
smartphones and tablets), fewer people watch TV commercials than in the
past. And online video is becoming more popular each year: In 2011, 83%
of U.S. internet users regularly watched online videos, and the research
company comScore estimated that 12% of the clips viewed were ads.
Moreover, because viewers actively choose online videos, they tend to
watch them more attentively than they watch TV ads. According to a 2010
survey by the research firm Vision Critical, 48% of those who watched an
online ad at any point subsequently visited the brand’s website, 11%
shared the video with a friend, and 22% made a purchase.
Create It Yourself or Find Outside Talent? Developing
an ad campaign involves two main tasks: Creating content and
distributing it. A traditional agency typically charges $100,000 to $1
million to produce a 30-second TV spot, and networks charge $14,000 to
$545,000 each time a spot airs. Companies looking to cut those costs can
take a do-it-yourself approach or outsource one or both of those tasks
to lower-cost firms. Let’s look at content creation first.
DIY content.
As you’d expect, the do-it-yourself approach is the cheapest—and
sometimes it works remarkably well. In the most celebrated example, in
2007 the kitchen appliance company Blendtec created a series of videos
in which the founder, Tom Dickson, demonstrated the power of its
products by blending such items as marbles, a rake handle, hockey pucks,
and iPods. The videos went viral on YouTube, landing Dickson on the Tonight Show and the Today Show,
and sales took off. The Blendtec videos have been viewed nearly 240
million times to date. But the odds of replicating that success are low:
Just 3% of YouTube films are viewed more than 25,000 times. Inside the
ad industry, relying on YouTube alone to get a message out is derided as
“post it and pray.”
Outsourced content.
Many companies, including Duck Tape, Lego, Duracell, and Braun, have
turned to Tongal, a four-year-old firm that, for a fee, posts specs for a
project and matches it with freelance creative talent willing to work
for relatively low pay. For instance, a company might want 90-second
videos that mention the brand name at least twice and show the logo for
two seconds. Tongal members submit 250-word proposals that meet those
specs, and the brand company pays $500, on average, for the rights to
the ideas it likes. Members then create clips based on the winning
ideas, with those who produce the best ones typically receiving $5,000
to $20,000. Because Tongal draws on the skill sets of many professionals
and competent amateurs, the ads tend to be of high quality.
Companies
pay $10,000 to $50,000, on average, for ads from Tongal, and the most
successful Tongal contributors have earned more than $150,000 from their
work on dozens of projects. Companies generally use the ads online, but
some go further: For example, Speed Stick paid $17,000 for a
Tongal-produced ad and laid out $4 million to air it during the 2013
Super Bowl, whose viewers ranked it higher than conventionally produced
ads for Coke, Pepsi, Subway, Lincoln, and Anheuser-Busch.
Engineered to Go Viral High-quality
content is not the only requirement for successful lean advertising;
effective distribution matters, too. Companies can again choose to do it
themselves or to contract outside
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