A colleague called my attention last night to the NBC show The Celebrity Apprentice, where two teams of famous contestants were tasked with producing a viral video for a real product – a laundry detergent. Interestingly, the contestant teams, which included otherwise very successful creative folks like Joan Rivers, Jesse James and Clint Black, failed pretty badly in their endeavor. The product stakeholders disliked the videos, as did host Donald Trump. Even celebrity judge Perez Hilton, though he liked the humor of one of the videos, thought that neither one would work as an effective product promotion. Some of the feedback from the evaluators included:
- The videos would likely offend the target audience
- There was no support for the brand message
- Though they both tried, neither really reached the intended level of humor
I’d recently written up a viral video case study for later release, but after watching last night’s show, i can’t help but release it today. The Will it Blend viral video series is arguably one of the best examples of low-cost, high-impact viral video product marketing. There are a lot of lessons to be learned from Blendtec – the company which did the videos. Perhaps it should be required reading for the next round of Celebrity Apprentice.
Please feel free to download and distribute the case study in PDF format by clicking on this link. We are releasing it under a free creative commons license while we figure out if/how we will be compensated for reports like this. If you would like to use it for your own purposes not covered by the license, please contact us and we’ll probably accomodate.
Please leave your comments on the report below, by the way. We’re always looking for good critique on this stuff!
This is really useful! I’m interning at http://www.francetoday.com and we’re trying to implement viral marketing into our strategy, and this was a great primer for me. Now I think I understand how that kind of marketing works.