Personal Branding has become a popular topic in the blogosphere and over social media these days. Personal Branding is about managing your reputation (online reputation being especially important these days) like you would manage an actual brand i.e. sort of a self-packaging exercise. [Read more…]
Sesame Street’s Old Spice Spoof
Sesame Street has come up with a spoof of the Old Spice advertisement that had a runaway success with social media masses. The original advertisement starring Isaiah Mustafa has gained up to millions of hits in a matter of hours it was released, becoming an instant hit.
Sesame Street’s Social Media Strategy
Sesame Street has done an amazing job at reinventing itself beyond the typical kids’ show. They realise that beyond the children, there is an increasing market of teenagers and young adults who have watched Sesame Street as a kid, and still love the characters. The content that is posted is consistently relevant, child-friendly, yet still enjoyable to older audiences.
It’s amazing how a children’s show can educate kids beyond the alphabet, teaching them current affairs such as the American mid-term elections, and also about the things around them, such as this video about Apple’s App Store. Not to mention the myriad of videos made based on popular culture such as the Old Spice commercial, Katy Perry, and more recently, Willow Smith’s I Whip My Hair Back and Forth
All these are part of Sesame Street’s attempt at remaining relevant to their key target audience – children, and also to target secondary audiences – parents. In this day and age where social media proliferates and takes up most of the time of the younger generation, the television-only business model is slowly being eroded. Businesses, even entertainment, would need to reinvent themselves to stay on the radar of their target audiences.
If they keep this up, Sesame Street would definitely still go on strong many years to come.
Momentos by LG Portugal – Marketing through social media
Advertisements are moving away from merely stating the impressive specifications of products or showing how cool stuff look. Marketers are looking at how to alter the perceived experience that consumers have with the product, and the image that the overall brand portrays.
What LG Portugal tried to do here was to show that LG brings the family together behind a TV Screen in quite a literal sense. The story is about how a homeless man is shown a clip of his child and their reunion at the end of the ad.
The advertisement highlights the key product proposition of LG televisions without explicitly lauding the benefits as other advertisements would. Instead, it shows the audience the ability of the TV to garner different viewers and the emotional appeal that it has.
Social Media Marketing
Such a video is really only possible through social media, where the low-cost of content publishing versus television ads means that agencies can develop a full story with a strong emotional hook without the cost that would come with traditional advertising.
The video is also clearly targeting the social media masses by creating a strong, compelling story that is both ‘sharable’ and can be a talking point on the social networks, creating a bigger impact than a short TV commercial, thus giving LG a higher ROI. What’s more, videos online tend to have a much longer shelf-life as compared to TV ads.
Growing trend
The trend of creating viral videos for social media networks is an increasing trend that will not abate in a while, with TV ads becoming obsolete today as consumers can choose to tune out at will. Companies would have to continually find new and interesting ways to engage their customers if they hope to get their message out.