Ah, successful virals. In a perfect world, all ad efforts would compel consumers to share them with friends and loved ones. In reality, it’s hard to get folks to even look at your ads, never mind send them around. The trick seems to lie in user-created content: Let the people control what they see. We found two efforts that did that, and went viral as a result.
Make Stewie dance
And pee, and fart, and poo. Whatever you want to see, little Stewie will comply at www.stewielive.com. ‘That’s what they want, so you give it to them,’ explains Sean MacPhedran, creative marketing strategist at Ottawa-based interactive agency Fuel Industries. The shop created the microsite for Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment Canada to promote the recent DVD release of Stewie Griffin, the Untold Story, a movie spin-off of the popular Fox TV show Family Guy. While most ad materials are picked up from the U.S. , Canadian marketing manager Carmen Schwalm decided to take a risk with a Canadian-made online initiative. It’s paid off: At press time, the site had received 100,000 Canadian visitors, and 600,000 visitors worldwide. ‘We’ve been really thrilled with how it’s sold,’ Schwalm says.
OXY kills off Chip
He had to go, so OXY decided to send him off with a bang. The ‘acne solutions’ brand recently discovered through target research that teens hated its mascot, Chip. So, they turned to Ottawa-based interactive agency Launchfire to come up with an online promo that would allow users to create ways to kill off Chip, then send the resulting ‘movies’ to friends to watch and create their own. Users have a choice of commands that map out Chip’s day, and all result in him dying in an amusing way, like being crushed by an opera singer. While OXY is tight-lipped about exact numbers, they will reveal that 34% of those who saw a link to the application clicked through to create and send a movie, and 89% of those who received a movie clicked through to watch it. The promo was commissioned by OXY’s parent company, Orchard Park, N.Y.-based Mentholatum. http://www.oxyoxygen.com/shredchip/rip.asp
