99 in the shade?
Back in June there was the mad scramble to book August holidays- it's is always 'the quiet month" right? Fortunately/Unfortunately for us, things at Rubber Republic are busier than ever with great new campaigns launching each week and new buzz tracking tools coming in to play alongside our Viral Manager service. Before we headinto what we hope will be a balmy August for you all, have a read on to see how the viral industry has fared over the last few weeks....
Quick Links
News Round-up:
Measuring Interactions
As we work on more and more campaigns with viral content, we constantly have to balance the need for great coverage and associations with the assets against cold, hard, measurable data on who interacts with it so that we can tell clients how the campaign has done.
In this week's NMA there is an interesting article entitled CPA vs CPM that explores the rise in demand for CPA (Cost Per Action) over CPM (Cost Per Mille or Thousand) for content publishers in order to clearly show this return on investment for online campaigns. The article gives views on both sides of the argument-
"Scott Gallacher, Sky's director of online says, "We've been pushing towards this model for over a year and we believe that's where the future buying model lies. It's truly performance media. Any organisation's desire is to look for media that performs against business targets."
and
"Brand advertisers use CPA selectively. For them the key is to appear in the right environment and associate with strong content. There's no obvious acquisition target for them." (Richard Martin, Account Director, MEC Interaction)
It's well worth a read to see the opinions of those interviewed as well as case studies of a couple of recent campaigns that have worked on both models.
In my opinion this is a horses-for-courses situation. We operate a CPA system with our Viral Ad Network publishers because it is a fair way to pay for their work as well as an incentive to give good content prominence, but we will also work with CPM publishers to ensure good coverage/association on campaigns where that is appropriate and within the clients stated aims. There is no doubt that CPA is on the up and that clients are demanding greater accountability for how and where their money is being spent- how this model might be applied to mailing list responses will be an interesting debate in the future....
Euroball ends in a blaze of glory!
Our much loved (by us and other people) Euroball game has now come to an end, with over 2 million plays. We were also able to run a private version of the game for our clinets and friend with a huge flatscreen TV put up as a prize by JVC. Well done to John, our eventual winner. Finally, the game was nominated the official Adobe Site of the Day for the 1st July due to it's sheer beauty and elegance.
You can see
Euroball honoured by Adobe here or you can play Euroball here
The last untapped advertising space....
"I want ad space that everyone can see, all the time!" shouts the impatient planner... well now he may have his dreams answered- we've seen projections on buildings, MINIs bolted to the side of the Roundhouse in Camden, writing on football pitches, paintings for online strippers on fields by airport runways and now FLOGOS have appeared in the USA.
FLOGOS can be made into any shape and create a foam and helium 'cloud' that floats up into the air they can, apparently, last for hours before evaporating into air (they have also been approved by aviation authorities!)
Go see for yourselves- proper 'blue sky' thinking maybe.... We'll all be using these soon.
Crazy American invention: FLOGOS
Rubber Republic on Brand Republic
Drum roll please . . . thanks to the nice people at Brand Republic we've now got a nice shiny new blog on the Brand Republic site called Rubbertopia , where we'll be sharing our pearls of viral wisdom with the digital marketing world and his dog.
5 of the best
The bar keeps raising in this world- here's a mixture of some of our favourite campaigns and not-so-campaigns (we had to include the Coren thing...)
We've all done it.
Race your way through the bar with the chunks flowing through your fingers. The FRANK campaign throws another 'ewww!" moment into the ring.
Rockcorps
Great concept for a campaign to get people engaged and doing something good- the LIve Earth for the people who actually give a *@%?
WWF
Karma... Watch where you put your litter these days or the worst could happen. This campaign shot thought the 300,000 mark in just a few weeks.
MTV Tropic Thunder
VIRAL! The medium has gone so mainstream that it's being parodied more and more... love the bit with the hammer!
Viral Letters
This flew around everyone last week- and has left Coren as a marmite character, have a read and see if you love him or hate him.
