Culture secretary Andy Burnham announced last week that he saw no place for product placement on live British TV. But since the practice is permitted in the growing areas of online and online on-demand, does the ban for live broadcast really matter?
To drive cinema admissions for Jack Black Comedy ‘Be Kind Wind’ with a relatively limited budget compared to the heavyweight releases for Rambo and Jumper.
The comedy Be Kind Rewind tells the story of a video worker who is forced to re-create and re-film all the store’s videos after they are wiped out in a freak accident. Customers soon become more fascinated in the home-made films than the originals and before long a movement gathers amongst locals to re-create films themselves - a process the film’s star Jack Black calls “sweding”.
Our strategy was to extend the concept of Sweding in to the real world via user-generated content sites, in doing so, helping to convey the unlikely concept of the film and creating a platform to build viral interest amongst online film enthusiasts
This was a unique campaign for Pathe as the strategy was digital focused. We created a dedicated YouTube channel that enabled film fans to upload their own “sweded” videos to win relevant prizes like a home cinema system. The channel was promoted throughout YouTube, targeting users who are interested in comedy and entertainment as well as the upload confirmation pages. We also negotiated to have the winning movie as a “featured movie” on the home page for a day and seeded clips and links across multiple viral and video sharing sites to drive traffic. To ensure entry quality was high, we proactively sent out a bespoke email to 25,000 film students encouraging them to flex their own film-making skills to produce the best films on the YouTube channel.
£4m at the box office! The YouTube site delivered over 23m impression with 93, 891 Video views on the YouTube channel. At the last count the number of videos was near 2,000 and growing.
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A constant struggle that VSO face is the need to raise significant funds each year. A key objective for VSO in 2008 was to put VSO higher up on people’s charity consideration list but with limited marketing budgets, not to the detriment of their volunteer recruitment drive.
To simultaneously drive both donations to VSO and to inspire people to want to become volunteers, it was essential to integrate the real experience of a VSO volunteer in to the communication.
Online video provided the opportunity to do this in a highly targeted way, with real scope to generate value through viral interest.
Exclusive video footage of volunteers in the field was created to increase understanding of what VSO achieves.
Three video MPU’s were created which showed a volunteer teaching in Ghana and allowed people to interact through selecting further footage on the VSO site.
They were embedded across The Times and The Guardian and gave a brief insight into what that particular volunteer was achieving. After the video there was a strong call to action inviting users to visit the VSO website to find out what other volunteers were doing.
The main video creative was used on The Telegraph TV where 100,000 pre-rolls ran before suitable content on the ‘News’ and ‘Culture’ sections. We also used 100,000 post-rolls after each piece of content so as to complete the ’story’ as well as inviting users to visit the site to find out more.
An average click through rate of 2% was achieved with the pre/post rolls proving most effective. We achieved over 10,000 visitors to the website during this campaign 1% of which gave their payment details to donate.
Although the objective of the campaign was to generate donations, interestingly 35 users inquired about forthcoming projections and 15 users actually applied to volunteer!
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