Last October, Pepper Advertising and Arthur Lok Jack GSB co-hosted a Creative Workshop called “The Rules Behind Breaking Creativity Rules”, where we learned out of the box strategies to create more effective advertising campaigns for our clients. The strategy that stood out to me the most was one called “Fight for a Cause”. It involves identifying a public issue that your target audience will champion, and building a campaign surrounding that issue. With shrewd media placement, the most successful examples take on a life of their own as enthusiastic fans spread a brand’s message without much effort from client or agency!
Perhaps you’ve heard of a little video called “Kony 2012”?
Invisible Children is the advocacy group behind the massively viral video. Clocking over 27 million views on Youtube after first surfacing earlier this week, it’s safe to say this is the first half hour long video to go viral this quickly. As a social media marketer, consider my mind blown.
Kony 2012 first came to my attention when I noticed it posted on a popular local Facebook page. A few minutes after that, a friend reposted it. Three more pages reposted it. Four other friends reposted it. It trended on Twitter. When I got home on Wednesday, I heard it blasting from my roommates’ computer.
The seemingly inescapable nature of the video reminded me of that creative workshop and got me thinking. Upon first viewing, the moneyed production values, slick editing and emotionally gripping score came together to gut punch my social conscience. Caught up in the hype, if I had a credit card I would have donated in a heartbeat. But looking at it through a marketer’s lens, I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t simply the best fundraising campaign in the history of advertising.
It’s food for thought, but there are no losers here. At best, donations inspired by this video will go towards improving the lives of suffering people. At worst, it’s certainly fodder for interesting conversation in Pepper’s art department, and a new awareness of a world outside our borders.
8 March, 2012, 7:09 pm
Well said young Jordan.
10 March, 2012, 8:16 pm
This has been nine years in the making I think…what about it made it so viral? The topic? it’s un-ness? (un-short)…anyway, according to Seth Godin, many people only watched a bit of it and the fund raising may not have done as well as one would think….so why did it spread?….because, like me, everyone wanted to stop and see what everyone was looking at. It happens at the highway car crash scene or any commotion on the street; only this time the whole world could see, dr
14 March, 2012, 12:41 pm
I find it almost impossible to watch or hear ANYTHING in the media without using both a consumer and a consumer psychologist’s brain. This Kony video amazed both these brains; The consumer brain bought into the emotional hype, wanted to do something to help, to get out there and share/support the cause! It wanted to make the world safe for Africans and educated white children everywhere.
The Consumer Psych brain analysed every second of the half hour and thought something like..
“WOW! This is possibly the greatest, most effective advocacy video ever made. It’s a lot of ‘b.s.’ but damn if this isn’t fun to take apart! THIS is what Marco (or whatever his name was), the frail, starving, near-death African child shown so many times in that video with the Sarah McLaughlin or other such similarly heart-melting music playing in the background should have been in. (You know the video. You’ve switched the channel when it came on many times.) Maybe THEN the world would have cared about him and donated that 5cents a day. Edited and scored JUST right, so nothing seemed overdone, overwhelming or cliche. African footage is given JUST enough time to have impact but not depress the mood, the education of the young boy was JUST SO CUTE that your cynicism never had a chance to influence your thinking and the footage of other activists (both of the real world and of the couch variety) around *your* age and *your* socioeconomic demographic came across as rousing and attainable instead of boring and ‘hippie-ish’. ANNND just for good measure they threw in the cynical, anti-government/bigcorporation rhetoric about governments never caring or doing anything to help the people. So they covered all their bases in terms of persuasive argument THEN they hit you with the merchandise and the line that you don’t need to buy but at least share. BODOW! young adults the world over were down for the count and handing over their US$30 faster than you could say ‘propaganda’. AND they had a shiny new bracelet, in time for April 20th, to show for/off their new activist status.
Cynicism aside, the Kony video will definitely be studied by social media/marketing/consumer psychology students (aren’t we all) for some time regardless of the outcome. I just hope there’s some REAL positives to be gained from this campaign.
28 March, 2012, 4:31 pm
From the marketing perspective, really great.
The detractors who say Kony is living as a fugitive…does that mean he should not be brought to justice? To me it doesn’t matter if he’s currently active in slaughtering people or decided to take up retirement, man needs to pay. And as stated in the post, where is the downside really?