I saw this great TV commercial the other day that reminded me of a Twitter conversation taking place about mismatched socks spawned from blog posts by so you wannabe a Domestik Goddess and Bargainista.
What was the commercial? It was an ad for the Egg Farmers of Ontario. You can view it here. I loved the ad, even though I’m not the target market (moms). I immediately wanted to share it with my Twitter pals having the sock discussion but realized that the ad didn’t have a url, which meant I could only share it, if I could find it.
I was quickly able to guess that it was probably from the Get Cracking website, which is some good branding by the way — don’t change your url.
Once I arrived at the site, I was able to see that the ad was there and learned that they were trying to engage mothers by asking them to share their thoughts: “As a mom, what does ‘it’s okay to be real’ mean to you?” and to provide their favourite “real” moments.
What a great campaign with legs for a fabulous viral aspect. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been set up for success.
Sure there are some boxes where you can forward the pages to friends. But where was the url in the TV ad? Relying on people’s memories is not the best thing to do. Why didn’t the TV ad engage and excite viewers to visit the website and share their stories? That’s such a great drive to get traffic to the site — and continue the momentum of a great commercial. Talk about a missed opportunity.
The other major things lacking from this campaign are social media tools. The video should have links right in it to embed into popular applications like Facebook YouTube and even book-marking sites like Digg. You should be able to forward the video from the video player/page itself rather than from a link further down the page once you’ve answered the other questions.
You can’t make something viral (as many of my industry peers and I say over and over again). But it makes it a lot easier for something to passed along if you provide the tools that make the sharing experience seamless and integrated.
Oh, and my favourite line from the commercial? “Mom, you don’t have to fold the napkin fancy; I just roll it into a ball.”
Rebecca Atkinson (Muller) is a freelance web marketing/analytics consultant with more than seven years of direct experience helping businesses create and implement online marketing and communications strategies. Her clients come from all industries including finance, technology and not-for-profit. She specializes in helping her clients determine how to improve their advertising programs, focusing on visitor behaviour – beyond the inital click-through. Full bio available