Do Buzz creation and facebook fans always lead to one another?
Oct 31st, 2011 by annaig
For my first post I would like to introduce the web campaign on wich I worked last year, for TBWA/Compact. It took place in 2 stages in France: the first one in June 2010 and the second one in February 2011. The web part was integrated in a 360° campaign, with such tools as press ads in magazines, event and direct marketing toward professional targets.
Context: The Cork Stopper producers were loosing market shares against their competitors and decided to launch a campaign to make the final consumer more aware of corks benefits. The insight they wanted to share was the ecological qualities of cork in terms of recyclability, sustainability, eco-system protection…
Creative idea: The idea TBWA suggested was to create 2 buzz videos promoting cork virtues through the ecological angle. They illustrated the remote of the cork tree bark in showing a strip tease made by a man and a woman wearing cork clothes. They wanted to use the “sexual attraction” of internet, using humor and the curiosity people would have to know were if the strip tease was “full” or not. The videos still online are not the same than the ones used for the campaign (because of copyright issues). The original ones had breaks during the strip tease and one had to give the right answer about cork advantages to make it play again. In the end, the web surfer was led to the original website composed of “5 good reasons to prefer cork” and goodies. It was possible to send an e-cards to friends with the videos.
The agency bought a lot of space on different websites with banners and google ads targeting websites with and important trafic She also built an emailing campaign to wine professionals to start the buzz through primary target. They initialized a facebook and a twitter page, hold by a web 2.0 agency charged to regular newsfeeds about cork.
The videos below
Results: the campaign was a satisfying success with more than 80,000 visitors in two weeks. The idea was to push the surfer to a website were they could get information about cork and its competitive advantages. The video did not have a great success on youtube but the number of visions on the web page and the time spent on each page was more than the objectives they had settle before the launching. The classic visitor spent 2 minutes and 53 seconds on the website (with a vidéo lasting 1 minute and a half) and went on 3,37 pages (amoung a total of 6 pages)The objectives in terms of number of visitors and pages viewed were more than achieved and the fallouts were positives and numerous.
Critics: Hence, the client was not totally convinced by the results. He was critical about the number of facebook fans the campaign achieved (about 750). It is true that no facebook system was set up in that time. The campaign was thought as a buzz, with its weaknesses: short and unsustainable. He was disappointed because he thought a buzz would necessarily lead to the web surfer adhesion and contested the campaigns outcome perception of TBWA.
Comments: This campaign was very interesting to work on, and that for some reasons. It underlined for me the fact that a “buzz” creation can have different scales. It can work on the small scale but it is very hard to create a “worldwide buzz”. Moreover, as it said by its meaning itself, a buzz is not a long lasting production. However a succeeded buzz should have both a significant lifetime and a high level of adhesion. That was for me the most important weakness of the cork campaign: we were working on a product with a very low adhesion level. Cork is not a very “sexy” product and it is somewhat hard to make the consumer aware of its benefits (mostly because it does not enter into account for the purchasing act because it is a “hidden part” of wine). The creative idea seems good regarding these different criteria: putting “sexy” into the cork, using humor to enhance people awareness about its ecological benefits were good ways to built an interesting relationship with the web surfer.
But why it did not work for Facebook?
The interesting thing is that the web 2.0 platforms existed and were settled and dynamic, but people did not subscribe to the different pages. Here again, it is maybe because cork as a weak adhesion power. But the campaign did work if we see the number of visitors and time spent on pages… It means that people clicked on the banner or the email, watched the videos, read the website but did not want to enter the “cork community” and promote cork despite the fact that they were now aware of all its ecological virtues. Something was broken in the “buzz” chain.
I can see two explanations for that: the first one is that this buzz was somewhat “artificial”. The fact that it worked is not contestable, but it was built almost entirely on the banners and space buying… we did not measure the transference rate, and this figure could have helped understand what was wrong. Indeed, if this rate was significantly low it would have shown what I suspect: people were curious of the campaign but not enough to want to share it with friends. The campaign was not involving enough, especially when you work on a product like Cork. Another explanation is that there is a “missing link” between the campaign and the 2.0 PR. Twitter and Facebook were thought as outer elements and not as structurally part of the process. The agency should have thought more deeply about the web surfer path through her campaign. For example, they could have asking people to subscribe to the Facebook page in order to see the end of the video in addition to question answering, so that people would have relayed the campaign through their Facebook profile…