DLF Indian Premier League – Did Coca Cola get it wrong? DilliDilSe.com a review

April 18th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

The DLF Indian Premier League, one of the biggest cricket extravaganza in the recent times, has started today!

Mumbai Indians has won the first match of the DLF IPL!! Though I dont have any team as my favorite in particular and am not really tracking the event for the teams and the matches, but there are many other reasons which I am tracking the event for!

The design of the event, the execution and specifically the activity happening on the internet with respect to the event. While driving to work each morning, I hear Coca Cola’s ads on the radio and the disclaimer at the end says www.dillidilse.com and today finally I got the time to catch up with the web site.

dillidilse

Including interactivity and creating an advertising cum promotional campaign with an objective for making the message viral is an one of the best possible ways today to engage your target audience. With Social Media changing the rules of the game, such a campaign was on the cards!

But showing a bottle of Cola getting filled surrounded with cricket  – Hmmm, I have my doubts!

The color and the design interface looks good, interactivity has been taken care of, to the extent that you can move the cards on the home page as you feel like. The entire concept sounds good, but I still am negative on this going viral and far from establishing Coke as the official drink for the DLF IPL (though this may not even be Coke’s vision) this is purely my thought on the platform and business objectives and value related to it.

I remember reading a case study while the Beijing Olympics were on, when people were not sure whether Pepsi or Coke was the official drink of the games!

A simple intuitive Strong Call to Action interface would have been better!

The campaign is engaging to the point that I would like to know the Delhi team, but am I really interested in knowing if a player is a Libran and what his interests are?! Would I share this information along? NO!! Virality is a far off dream, though it may work for Coke, as it would spend big marketing dollars in employing big online marketing agencies.

I remember a couple of previous viral campaigns which I blogged about previously, with simple, 2 static flash based web pages, but a high Call To Action! They clearly never gave you an interruptive message at your face to go and buy the product, but were high on Brand Establishment and brand recall!

The message being delivered by Coke can be much enhanced and the whole campaign be leveraged towards a higher engagement value with the end consumer, carefully working on the market segmentation, and understanding the message that the consumer is looking out for.

Looking forward to some exciting action at the DLF IPL!!

Viral Marketing – You’re fool if you think if your VIRAL creation is Marketing you!

February 18th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

Well, to start with, I was talking online with one of my friends who is pursuing her HR in Canada this morning. We generally talk about lots of stuff, and today she remarked ‘why be such a pessimist’? And well I realised yes, that’s it!

Being a Social Media Marketing Evangelist –

What do I do she asked, and I started giving her all the fundas and tips and tricks on all what goes on and is going on and what’s the way ahead: which I wrote in my previous post: what would Social Media be in 2009 and then it struck me are we going the right way?

What is Viral Marketing? How do you define the success of your Viral campaign? How do you creae that Oh! So awesome viral message which your followers would take forward?

I know these are common questions anyone can think of, but what I am stuck with is this: Does your Oh! so Viral Campaign really markets you out?

Well, and the next thing I did was to Google on the topic and what I found was this: a classic Seth Godin post, what is viral marketing, Seth raises a very crucial point here:

There are two kinds of Viral marketing:

Viral Marketing
Viral Marketing
  • The original classic sort in which the marketing is the product and which a self-amplifying cycle occurs. Hotmail, for example, or YouTube. The more people use them, the more people see them. The more people see them, the more people use them. The product or service must be something that improves once more people use it.
  • A second kind has evolved over the last few years, and that’s a marketing campaign that spreads but isn’t the product itself. Shepard Fairey’s poster of Barack Obama was everywhere, because people chose to spread it. It was viral (it spread) and it was marketing (because it made an argument–a visual one–for a candidate.

- text taken from Seth Godin’s blog: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/12/what-is-viral-m.html

And I was amazed to think how my thought process connected with Seth’s :)

Well, What I have been rattling my brains over is does your Viral campaign really achieves your marketing purpose?

And Seth does answer this question in a really effective manner: He says Virality is not a feature that you attach to your campaign.

The critical element of viral marketing is this: it’s built in. It was built into Hotmail and built into YouTube. The more people used the camera on their cell phones, the more the idea spread, the more people wanted a camera.

What do I feel?

Well, Viral Marketing is not  a value-added-service. In fact it is in-built. Its inside your offering. So the game changes here.

The Game changes here – for marketers

For all those marketers who have been selling over time and doing all the things possible to reach to the clients, trying to customize the offering according to the needs, and expecting WOMM (word of mouth marketing) to happen, the game has changed.

There have been a number of Un-successful attempts at Viral marketing. To tell you about an interesting one I saw a few days back is the “AdultDost.com” a Viral Marketing message for Tata Sky done by a media company. Well looking at the name doesnot it sound like an adult site? And YES! the message works!

You think it is, and you go there and well, the rest is “I went there, I liked it and I am blogging about it”

Its not about creating that message, It’s about: Creating a message that would be of value to the target market that you are creating the message for!

Go Viral…this new year.