This month's 'Planner's Favourite' goes to...
This guest post, the third in our ‘Planner’s Favourite’, is written by Greg Paterson, Planning Account Director at Carat. We've asked Greg to chose a favourite between three exciting campaigns from Trident Unwrapped, The Hangover, and Sprite's 'Green Eyed world'. Many thanks to Greg for a great post. - Ed.
Trident Unwrapped takes a simple competition mechanic and attempts to bring it to life beyond the traditional micro-site approach. While the YouTube channel itself is far from revoutionary, it keeps things simple and has clearly acted as a great lever to the rest of the campaign.
The idea in here of using the stunts and Kiss partnership to drive buzz is nice, and looks great as a campaign video, while being supported by impressive stats.
That said it still remains as a relatively straight forward competition which has taken its lead from T-Mobile and falls into the trap of being far more Beyoncé than Trident. While I’m sure the halo of the relationship with Beyoncé is great I would fear that this has shifted more records than gum?
The Hangover to me is frankly a bit of a cheat. It just not fair when you have such great content to play with! That said when you’re planning a film launch without ‘names’ to hang it off then you really are starting on the back foot.
What has been done here is to avoid the temptation to over complicate things, focussing on clear content and making sure that all expectations are met (comedy clips, UGC and Facebook links).
The street activity in this instance is about content creation, with the prize feeling less over riding than in the Trident campaign. Every element just seems to fit together and sometimes it's that comfort with a campaign which shows you exactly what makes a great piece of work.
All I can say is that when you have content like this, use it to its best potential. Warner Bros have done this with The Hangover. It would have been easy to throw in hangover ecards and calling in sick messages etc etc, but they’ve avoided getting bogged down in the widget trap and all I can say is that it’s a relief to see (for a change).
Now, having talked about keeping it simple and avoiding the temptation of going with the all singing all dancing social media approach, I have to admit that Green Eyed World to me is certainly the best use of YouTube of the three.
It’s a slightly different situation, as the campaign is a social media campaign, with unique content and isn’t driving a particular launch. In this sense it is slightly unfair to compare like for like with a competition driven campaign for Trident and a movie launch Warner Bros.
What Coca-Cola have done here is pretty much textbook in social media implementation. Doing this with the complications of being international, and with all of the baggage which comes with using a celebrity it is a pretty impressive feat.
There is a much greater focus on functionality in this campaign, and while the content is appealing, it’s the access and flexibility of the campaign which really makes this the stand out example of how to use YouTube.
While The Hangover does the job really well, it is heavily reliant on being such a great film in the first instance, so I have to say that Greeen Eyed World to me is the winner hands down.