In what was one of the best marketing campaigns of 2012, TNT placed a large push button in “an average Flemish square of an average Flemish town” to celebrate the channel’s launch in Belgium. What happened next was filmed and adapted into an online and televised advertisement. To date, the Youtube version has attracted some 42 million viewers worldwide. While the firm admits that the ad was originally intended to gain awareness and attention in Belgium, the international exposure has certainly been a pleasant surprise. It is no easy task to create a viral video, and it appears that even the advertisement’s producers were surprised with its global success. This is something that I hope to learn more about in COMM 296: how can one video garner so much attention in such a short period of time? What was it about TNT’s advertisement that caught the eye of people all over the world? I will admit that it was a unique approach that I had not seen before, but with millions of video posts on online media websites each day, I am fascinated and eager to learn more about how businesses successfully cut through the noise and launch successful campaigns like TNT’s.

The advertisement’s success did not just raise awareness for the firm’s launch in the Benelux region, but it also helped TNT’s bottom line. This past December, only months after launching in the region, Dutch IPTV provider KPN signed an exclusive distribution deal with TNT for its Benelux channel. While a number of factors helped to make this deal a success, many news sources were quick to follow the details of the acquisition by mentionning that TNT’s launch in the region began after an extremely successful advertising campaign. I have no doubt that the viral video helped take TNT in Belgium to a level that made it an attractive takeover target.

Enbridge Inc. has been working to garner public support and ultimately governmental approval for its proposed Northern Gateway pipeline project for years. It goes without saying that politicians will not approve the proposal if Enbridge cannot effectively make its case to citizens and convince them that the benefits of the Northern Gateway would outweigh the environmental risks. The firm has tried to do this through marketing the economic benefits of the project to the public by generating quantitative “evidence” to help its case. For instance, the pipeline’s estimated economic benefits are based off of the firm’s proposal document to the National Energy Board. It has recently come to light however that Enbridge submitted a 30-year scenario that assumed a constant exchange rate for the entire period (this is extremely unrealistic and paints a more positive economic picture of the pipeline’s economic impact). Beyond that, the firm provided no sensitivity analysis in its report and failed to impress industry professionals as a result of its lack of due diligence. Said Canadian energy executive Marc Eliesen: “It is my contention that Enbridge has submitted marketing propaganda masquerading as economic analysis because of the one-sided, self-serving private benefit picture the proponent has presented.”

For a multi-billion dollar multi-national corporation to fail to include multiple scenarios in its economic analysis is shocking. I find it hard to believe that such a large and successful firm would simply forget to include these hugely important facts in its analysis; instead, I think that Enbridge is towing a fine line to convey its message of economic benefits in a way that is hugely skewed in its favor yet still within the law. However, while it may be legal, such a practice is blatantly unethical, and as Canadians continue to learn more about the issue they will appreciate that the plan needs to go back to the drawing board and Enbridge must supply more realistic information so as to allow government and the people to arrive at a more educated decision.