“Ten Super Bowl Ads Generated 44.7 Million Views the Week After the Game …”
– Advertising Age headline, Feb. 19, 2010
So what? So none of those nearly 50 million Web impressions were paid advertising in the traditional sense of the word. They were either self-hosted on the sponsors’ websites or virally spread via blogs, fan sites and social networks. Good deal for advertisers, less so for traditional Web publishers.
But is it significant? Hard to say, since most of the viewers who watched the ads on the ‘net had probably already seen them as paid spots during the Big Game. There is some evidence, however, that spots produced specifically for free distribution on the Web can and do sell product.
Entering the Twilight Zone, we hear Rod Serling’s introduction, “we submit for your approval” a true example from a dimension “not only of sight and sound, but of mind.”
The date: Late October, 2009. The time: Midnight, skidding toward dawn. The location: A home office crammed with stacks of black boxes, cables leading nowhere, heaps of (all four varieties) gadgets — defective, broken, useless, and incompatible. Illumination: An ugly, sterile, overhead fluorescent reflecting off the surface of a grotesquely oversized monitor. The setting: A prototypical hangout for a hopelessly addicted computer geek or hardcore gamer.
But we’re in the Twilight Zone, so the half-human, half-zombie slumped in front of the monitor, with heavy black bags under his eyes, is neither. He is, rather, a bored, cynical, middle-aged businessman idly browsing cell-phone fan sites because he’s too job-stressed to sleep and can’t think of anything better to do.
He’s read a few reviews, watched a couple of videos, and is about to stumble off to bed when a bloodshot orb falls upon a link called, “Unboxing the HTC Hero.” Clicking the link, he finds a video of Google’s latest Android phone being extracted from its box. A video that’s a Twilight Zone, or maybe two, away from the usual ham-handed, excessively talky unboxing videos typical of gadget fan sites and their YouTube posts.
This one has no voice-over. No text-over. No glam flicks or PowerPoints or sports videos running on the tiny screen. Nothing but video of the phone being slowly, sensuously rotated in front of the camera. And one other thing, a single-song soundtrack featuring the decade-old, teen-angst ballad, “Hey There, Delilah.”
Four or five bars into the tune thoughts of sleep have been displaced by a state of trance. The video plays on unseen as a disembodied mind drifts serenely through a Tin Pan Alley fantasy where a struggling young guitar player professes undying love to a girlfriend trapped in school at the far end of a lover’s rainbow.
Seven minutes after this rather Serling-esque out-of-body experience, the businessman is downloading “Hey there, Delilah” from Rhapsody. And in twelve hours he finds himself hunched over a Sprint counter writing a $279 check.
Was that Sprint/HTC/Google “commercial” which ran on at least 180 sites and blogs devoted to cell phones, mobile technology, and/or other CE gadgets — sites with an aggregate monthly hit total well into the millions — an ad, a public service spot, a product placement, or something else altogether?
Since neither Sprint, Google, nor HTC had to make an advertising buy to acquire most of those positions and end-user impressions, it certainly wasn’t a commercial. At least not according to the IAB’s 2009 Digital Video Ad Impression Guidelines which link “digital video commercials” to “buyers and sellers.”
(Note: Positions on some popular sites may have been purchased in order to salt the mine, but from that point on viral marketing took the ball and ran it — for free — over the goal lines of YouTube and hundreds of bloggers and webmasters who picked it up and posted it on their sites, usually in prominent locations and almost always 24/7, for at least several weeks.)
If not a commercial, perhaps it was a public-service spot or a product placement.
Despite providing valuable (if biased) information to shoppers, it is quite clearly not exactly what most people would define as public-service spots.
Maybe “product placement” fits. It certainly appears that it should. Alas, it doesn’t. In the first place, most big-time product placements are paid for. Which makes them commercials. More importantly, product placements are traditionally not scripted by the product providers … where and how the product will be deployed (subject, of course, to contractual stipulations that the “Coke” bottle, for instance, won’t be used to batter the serial killer’s victims) is up to the content creators.
Harley-Davidson, for instance, maintains a suburban L.A. facility specifically to provide “product placement” motorcycles to TV and movie producers, magazine editors, rock stars looking for stage props, etc. What with insurance costs and repairing the damage incurred by most of the loaners, the operation probably burns through about $200,000 a year.
But does Harley get to decide what the actors astride their bikes will say, whether their motorcycles will appear ugly/grimy or shiny/beautiful, if they are going to be shot running at speed on a gorgeous stretch of road or carelessly leaning on an alley wall? Nope, sorry, nada. (Even so, given the millions who will see those motorcycles in theaters and their living rooms, that $200,000 may produce the highest ROI of anything Harley does.)
From a manufacturer’s or agency POV, not getting the final say on such things is the essence of product placement. Owning time and/or space and being free to fill it with pure propaganda is advertising. By this yardstick, the Hero spots are advertising. Produced specifically to deliver a postive sales message to a demographically defined market segment.
Advertising. Pure and simple. And unpaid. A viral phenomena which may, as time goes by, prove to be of consequence in the post-recovery development of the Internet’s display-advertising industry.
