My deep rooted hatred towards the “Million Dollar Homepage” stems probably by around 99% from pure unadulterated envy. But there is something else in there as well, something slightly more real. I mean, this is an interesting concept online - because the complete nothingness that is the draw actually becomes somethingness when the whole party takes off - i.e., buying a pixel on a homepage potentially becomes (and in this case, likely became) a whole lot of traffic to your website.
If that traffic was worth anything or not is another question completely. One that I will not discuss now.
What I want to discuss is the Swedish (I suppose) Cancer Foundations new campaign dubbed (freely translated by me) “The 32nd of July - Be a part of creating a new day”. The idea here is to sell seconds to create a new day. The seconds cost 20SEK each. Which means that this campaign is intended to generate 1,728,000SEK, or roughly 300,000USD.
That is fine, I am still onboard.
So, how did they chose to market this little gimmick? Hardcore online stuff? Hardly, and if they did it was a miserable failure as I have seen nothing of it. They did, however, chose to go hardcore offline. I have seen these posters everywhere.
(Slightly off topic: one of the absolutely most active advertisers in the Swedish telecom industry is “3″. They spend hundreds of millions of Swedish Crowns yearly on all types of advertising. One day, someone remarked passingly to me that “they need to recoup that money, somehow” when I was complaining about their evil cost structure. That one comment has stayed with me since, and as such I find it somewhat tasteless to see charities spend money on ads.)
But those ads probably did not cost over 300,000USD, so we are probably fine. Right?
Well, wrong. As of today, 2-4 days before a presumed deadline (depending on time zone and if or if not you count the 32nd as an actual day) they have gathered all of 55 minutes. That means that cash money in the bank as of now is around 64,000SEK or around 11,000USD. That money has not by any means covered the ad campaign cost.
So, therefore I say that this was a failure.
That being said, I must make one point wholly and fully clear: a failed campaign is not indicative of overall failure. Indeed, many of my campaigns have had “success rates approaching zero”. (I don’t know the exact definition of this defense mechanism, but being able to say “success rates approaching zero” simply makes it easier to take than “disastrous failures”.)
No, it is not the failure of the campaign as such that upsets me. It is the idea of trying to apply a fully and wholly online concept to tired commuters half-reading ads on the side of the road on their way to work. This could have been great if the communication & marketing campaign was executed by some web marketing ninjas rather than the tired, stale and old fashioned media agencies eager to sell their old fashioned offline channels. (Not saying that all offline channels are bad in all cases - there are many good uses for them.)
Back to the point: in any and all activities today including any type of communication, the web must be a part from the very beginning. In every meeting discussing advertising, PR, HR-recruiting, crisis management, market expansion, mergers & acquisitions and practically everything else - make sure you have a web savvy individual close at hand. She or he might not always intervene, but when she or he does, you will be glad. Likely, she or he just made you more effective and saved you money and time.
David
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