Month: September 2010

Do you remember Burger King’s viral subservient chicken campaign?It was probably the most groundbreaking ad of the last decade, which is followed by a few other campaigns on the Internet like the Samsung’s YouTube takeover game, the Cadbury, and more.

Now, we have, most recently, the Tipp-Ex whiteout viral marketing campaign exemplifying a brand promise: the power of whiting out (and changing the future).

To celebrate the back to school period, Tipp-Ex BIC Group’s brand gets creative with a YouTube inactive campaign called “A hunter shoots a bear.” Viewers are invited to write whatever they want into the whited-out area of the interface and rewrite the ending!

Only a week after launching the video and they have racked up over 4 million views on YouTube. I remember reading Ries and Trout’s Product Positioning as a preparation for the last COMM 101 class, and have come across the term “first mover advantage”. Burger King certainly achieved this by being the initial occupant using an interactive ad. However, Tipp-Ex most definitely made a mark in consumer’s mind by making great use of social media and word of mouth.

How well did the Tipp-Ex campaign perform?

As you pull your wallet out at the grocery store’s checkout line, you quickly skim over the monitor display to double check that no items were scanned twice. You have your bill ready, when the clerk asks whether or not you would like to donate $2 for good cause.

For which charity, you may ask. A clerk at a large-scale grocery store may know enough to give you the name, but retailers simply promise that your money will be donated generally. The concern of where your dollars are supposedly going leads to an ethical issue. Perhaps some companies use embedded givings as a marketing technique to increase their profit. Simply pocket the donations, keep it off of their income, and voila! A few hundred thousand dollars all to itself. If our assumption is right, not only are they exploiting its donors and whichever charity’s name they used, but also its own company’s reputation, and ultimately affects the society as a whole.

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