Promotions 2.0Blurring the line between interactive advertising, promotions and social network marketing.

February 12th, 2009

New Viral Campaigns not so Viral.

Last year McDonalds launched a television commercial for Chicken McNuggets featuring 2 guys who created viral buzz with a catchy rap jingle on YouTube. Now Visa has launched a travel-focused campaign starring internet celebrity Matt Harding, who dances his way through several locations across Asia, promoting Visa’s global currency campaign.

In the new commercial Matt celebrates the hassle-free joy of the unnecessary currency exchange due to the mass acceptance of Visa, as he travels around the world. The advert debuted in Hong Kong and Korea and will be broadcasted in eight countries and territories in the Asia Pacific region over the next few weeks.

After high school Harding decided to skip university and become a video game developer. His career took him to Brisbane for 2½ years. His first video, filmed while travelling with a co-worker, was made simply as a running gag for family and friends, but quickly spread virally across the web, when he posted his video of him dancing in front of landmarks and street scenes in various international locations on his YouTube account mattharding2718 in 2005. Today over 1,3 million people have watched that video.

Unlike most viral web hits, Harding’s popularity has increased with time. The 2006 video took a little over two years to reach 10 million hits but the latest one, posted on YouTube on 20 June 2008, passed that mark in 83 days and has been viewed 13,242,894 times as of 2 December 2008.

Ad Agencies have the right idea by extending these campaigns to television, but at the same time are totally missing the point. Both of these campaigns have no online extension. No interactive component for consumers to engage with. That’s the one reason they were successful in the first place?

Unfortunately this shows the one dimensional thinking of Big Agencies, no matter how much they talk about digital integration they still insist on trying to make TV the center of the universe.