Thanks to online video, a brand’s newest advertisers may be its customers
By Mary Wagner
Pet enthusiasts are just as eager to share pictures of their furry and four-footed friends as other people are to show photos of their kids. Retailer Petco.com knows this. It also knows that video often can be more compelling than still shots. So it made consumer-generated videos the basis of one of its latest marketing campaigns.
On July 14 customers at 100 of Petco’s nearly 900 stores strutted their pets’ stuff in the Petco Stars talent contest. The winners in each store were asked to upload to Petco’s web site a one-minute video of their dog or cat performing the winning pet trick. After Petco judges narrowed the field to 12 finalists, site visitors were asked to vote on their favorite video to pick the contest winner, who will receive a trip for two to Los Angeles and a role for the pet in an upcoming Petco advertising campaign.
The contest is using the free upload services on YouTube.com. Anyone—including marketers—can upload videos and gather votes on YouTube for free. YouTube advertisers also have another option when running branded contests: access to extra tools and functionality—such as design help and ads placed throughout YouTube to drive tubers to their content.
It’s not the first time Petco has experimented with mixing user-generated video and marketing. In April it added a new video option to its on-site customer review functionality from vendor Bazaarvoice Inc. Consumers not only can write about how their dog loves his new chew toy—or not—but also can upload video of Rover playing to his heart’s content. Bazaarvoice screens the videos and places them on Petco.com.
A bigger payoff
In an Internet world where marketers have become accustomed to a precise measurement of ROI in traffic, clicks and sales, John Lazarchic, Petco vice president of e-commerce, sees a bigger payoff in using consumer-generated video.
“At the end of the day we always want sales. And with the video reviews, if they are done well, I think we will see an uptick on the products that have that type of review,” Lazarchic says. “With the written reviews, we’ve been able to tie it back to ROI. But I think the return with video will be more on engagement with the web site, site stickiness, and people’s tendency to come back to Petco as a source of information than necessarily a direct purchase as a result of this technology.”
The idea of spending on any online marketing tactics focused on customers’ engagement with a brand or product instead of directly on the fastest route to sales was shoved aside by many online marketers in the early struggle on the web for survival. But the approach is returning as more e-retailers find profitability and consider the future. Traditional search marketing, affiliate marketing and comparison shopping engines may be great at connecting consumers with products they’re looking for, but they don’t do much to fan the flames of a consumer’s feelings of emotional connection to a product or brand.
Building loyalty
“With more sites profitable, it’s now about building a loyal customer base against your competition,” Lazarchic says, “especially in a category like pets where you have several competitors selling the same product. The reality is if a customer does a search for a pet product, you and your competitor are both right there. So if a customer has to make a decision between the two on something besides price, what else can I use?”
Letting customers interact with a brand or product in new ways is one answer, and that’s driving marketers’ growing experimentation with consumer-generated content from reviews to blogs to community forums to photo-sharing.
“The notion of consumer engagement and consumer participation will be an element of a good majority of campaigns launched by marketers in the next two to three years,” says Reggie Bradford, CEO of ViTrue, a consumer-generated advertising platform that hosts and runs consumer-generated video contests for brand marketers.
The concept of letting your consumers do your advertising isn’t new. “The Pillsbury Bake-off was essentially user-generated content in an offline venue,” says Matt Kates, vice president of strategy at interactive promotions agency ePrize. “Video is just moving forward from that. It’s really taken off in the last year or two.” To that point, ePrize, which did its first online promotion using consumer-generated video only last year, has now completed a total of three video campaigns with six more in the works.
Generally, consumer-generated video promotions take the form of a contest. For brand marketer Pringles, for instance, ViTrue recently completed a campaign, “Jingles for Pringles,” in which consumers uploaded self-produced musical odes to the snack chip for a chance to win a trip to the finals of TV’s “American Idol.”
The huge popularity of YouTube is a major factor and a key driver in marketers’ experimentation with consumer-generated video. Traffic to YouTube has soared in the past year, with the number of unique U.S. visitors rising from 13.4 million in June 2006 to 43 million two months ago, an increase of 222%, according to comScore Networks.
Without YouTube, industry observers say, there would be few consumer-generated video promotions. YouTube helped make online video popular and helped consumers understand that uploading video to the Internet is easy to do. Were that not the case, any online consumer-generated video promotion would not only have to educate users on a featured product, but also on how to upload a video, creating a higher hurdle to consumer participation.
That said, however, from a marketing perspective, the use of consumer-generated video still is in the testing stage. That’s one reason many—though not all—such promotions to date have come from brand advertisers large enough to have big advertising budgets, including funds dedicated to testing.
“Companies like Coca-Cola, where it’s really about the consumer experience, are feeling they are not getting as much out of television,” says Emily Riley, advertising analyst at JupiterResearch LLC. “They are used to spending larger budgets for testing; it’s the comfort zone they have. If you are pretty much any other type of advertiser, you are sticking to a smaller-budget test version.”
Some marketers who’ve tested consumer-generated video campaigns have found it’s not for them. Riley cites a brand manufacturer of a cleaning product that ran a contest looking for video essays on how people cleaned their bathroom. Consumers turned up their noses at submitting videos on that topic. The lesson: Don’t ask people to submit content on something they don’t really care about, Riley says.
Finding a good fit
Riley says marketers considering campaigns using consumer-generated video need to ask themselves if the campaign will reach their core audience. Hyatt Resorts and Hotels researched that question for itself and found the number of moms researching family vacations online was a good fit with its strategic objective of getting consumers to stretch their perception of Hyatt hotels as a destination for business travelers to one that includes Hyatt resorts as a family vacation venue.
Hyatt is betting on an online campaign to do the job, one that combines consumer-generated video with slicker, professionally produced video content. The Hyatt Resorts Ultimate Adventure Challenge, produced by Curium Studios, a unit of interactive agency Critical Mass, invited families to submit audition videos. Hyatt advertised the contest on its own site, with an e-mail campaign targeting its frequent travelers and banner ads on selected sites and social networks.
Hyatt produced a spot for its own site demonstrating how to prepare and upload an audition video that shows the family engaged in an event or activity that demonstrates “a spirit of adventure,” says Jim Forni, vice president and executive producer at Curium.
Hyatt posted what it judged to be the best of the submissions on its web site, and 20 families were invited to a live audition in June. From that audition, five families were selected to compete in the Ultimate Adventure Challenge, with activities ranging from roping steer to a scavenger hunt, filmed at three Hyatt resorts. Curium is filming the competition, but when the webisodes are posted on Hyatt’s site this month, they’ll also include video shot by family contestants equipped with helmet cameras.
Dual objectives
The prize is 50 free nights at Hyatt Resorts—but that won’t go only to the winning family. With the campaign objective not only getting people to submit a video but also getting more people to watch and vote, one randomly selected voting viewer will get the same prize.
“The ROI for the campaign will be based on the amount of time families spend online being immersed in this content translating into more push-through to the sites for those resorts and more bookings of family vacations,” Forni explains. While he didn’t disclose the cost of the campaign, Forni says Hyatt is measuring the cost against the high revenue associated with family vacation bookings.
If an examination of whether a consumer-generated video campaign will reach a marketer’s core audience comes up negative, does the non-core audience it will reach have value? Digital product peripherals maker Logitech ran through that exercise, decided a video contest would appeal to a younger audience it hadn’t previously targeted, and came up with one of the most popular online video contests ever run on YouTube.
Logitech’s core customers are not 18- to 24-year-olds, but they are consumers it wants to reach. Last year the company decided to build brand awareness in that youth demographic and get the word out that its products—specifically, the Logitech QuickCam—are a way for consumers to express themselves on social networking sites. “The idea was that for as little at $29, you, too, can be a YouTuber,” says Todd Hernandez, product marketing manager at Logitech.
Logitech determined the basic tools available for free on YouTube didn’t provide enough visibility for what it wanted to do. “There is so much free content up there that it’s hard for the cream to rise to the top,” Hernandez says. So Logitech became one of the first paying advertisers to run a branded contest, which ran on YouTube’s platform from November 2006 through January 2007.
How not to
Logitech’s call to action invited contestants to upload videos showing how not to do something in the category of their choice. As a play on the contest theme, the two big prizes were on the order of “how to”—drum lessons from Travis Barker of the band Blink182 and rap lessons from rapper Jibbs. To make sure its contest messaging was on target for its intended audience, Logitech took on as content partners for the campaign two of the leading producers of content for YouTube, a duo known as Smosh. Based on their participation in YouTube, the two college studnets were featured in Time Magazine’s “You” Man of the Year coverage in 2006.
Smosh produced a video that announced the contest and provided examples of contest entries. Aligning the campaign with Smosh boosted the visibility of the campaign, as the pair has more than 100,000 content subscribers who receive an e-mail alerting them every time Smosh posts a new video on YouTube.
The campaign produced 1,700 entries, about 600 of which were qualified for display on YouTube by Hernandez, who had to screen them for inappropriate material, copyright violations and relevance to the contest topic. “Sometimes people would upload video completely unrelated to the contest just to get more views from the people watching our contest,” Hernandez says.
The 600 videos displayed on YouTube got millions of views, Hernandez says. Viewers voted to award one of the prizes; Smosh picked the other winner.
But did the campaign sell Logitech QuickCams? Hernandez says Logitech did not track through from YouTube to sales on Logitech’s e-commerce site, but that the site represents only a very small portion of Logitech’s sales as most of its products are purchased in stores. “We do know from a past campaign that was posted on YouTube using our webcam that sales of the product on places like Amazon definitely did tick up. So we know from that that tying Logitech webcams to popular videos on YouTube has increased sales,” he says.
Hernandez says Logitech’s two main metrics going into the campaign were the number of contest entries and the number of contest viewers, with contest results exceeding original expectations on both counts. Logitech also dug into metrics such as registrations, the use of tell-a-friend e-mails and click-throughs on contest banner advertising. Though he did not disclose these results, Hernandez says Logitech is “very pleased, given that this is a demographic Logitech hadn’t previously targeted.”
Traditional online metrics were a lesser objective of this campaign, Hernandez explains. “I was more interested in brand awareness, product functionality awareness, growing the category and reaching that audience,” he says. Against these measures the campaign also performed well, he says.
He adds he was able to demonstrate to management how the campaign worked for Logitech and why it made money for the company by comparing its cost and return to traditional advertising campaigns. An added benefit over such campaigns was detailed information collected about how well the YouTube campaign hit the target audience as a function of being online.
Calculating ROI is a perpetual challenge in decisions about how to spend marketing money. This is one reason pay-per-click advertising has grown in popularity: It provides quantifiable information that directly tracks to traffic and sales. But in the quest to bring shoppers back to a site or a brand, marketers experimenting with consumer-generated video campaigns—as well as other forms of less-traditional customer outreach—are facing up to the fact that they need to do something more to bond with their customers than simply delivering them quickly to the opportunity to buy.
That is why at this early stage in the development of online video and other forms of consumer-generated content as marketing tools, the greatest value of such campaigns may not be so much in hard metrics but in the learning they provide.
“Some think the true benefit is the experimentation,” says Kates of ePrize. “To be a leader in marketing, you have to push yourself and your capabilities. If you wait for proven case studies where everything is documented, you could be left behind. So you invest wisely, and if you fail, you move forward from a learning standpoint.”
mary@verticalwebmedia.com
