This month's 'Planner's Favourite' goes to...
This guest post in our ‘Planner’s Favourite' series, is written by Matthew Hook, Head of Strategy at Vizeum. We've asked Matthew to chose a favourite between three campaigns from E.ON, The Royal Marines, and Carl's Jr. Burgers. Many thanks to Matt for a great post. - Ed.
Three very different pieces of work, three very different answers to the question “What is YouTube?”
EON have decided that YouTube is a place to demonstrate their willingness to engage in an open dialogue with their consumers about the future of energy. They have embraced openness, and haven’t sought to pre-edit what in some cases are some slightly silly contributions.
This approach requires a great level of commitment from the company. Some of the users clearly felt that the company’s response could have been a little bit quicker and a bit less corporate, and also that there wasn’t a clear sense of what the company would do with the feedback. So top marks for ambition, but some room for improvement on delivery so that this feels like a real company commitment.
For the Royal Marines YouTube is a chance to give exposure to a range of content that can’t be delivered effectively through broadcast media. The content and delivery of the site is of really high quality and very interesting. The numbers aren’t huge, but the strategy clearly relies on quality rather than quantity, and people’s response has been highly enthusiastic.
The only danger here is that you end up with a solution that feels just a little reliant on ‘broadcast’ thinking. It uses YouTube as a channel, rather than a platform and community. As an opening gambit this is great – but it would be intriguing to see what the Royal Marines will do with these people now that they have got them interested, and how it can use them to help others to get involved.
Then a very different approach form Carl’s Burgers. They seem to me to have the most insightful understanding of what YouTube is – a content sharing platform that has been built into a creative community by the efforts and expertise of its ‘super-users’.
Carl’s aren’t trying to change the world, and really they are just getting people to play with their advertising. But the big difference is that by enthusing super-users they have achieved much bigger numbers – including 1,000,000 video views in 24 hours particularly.
So Carl’s Burgers is my overall planner’s choice – simply for recognising that YouTube is a community that has some really powerful leaders, and engaging those leaders with their campaign to deliver enthusiastic engagement on a massive scale.