Articles about Campaigns

The Gingerbread Haka animated video for The New Zealand Bakery of the Year competition managed to cross the advertising channels of web and television successfully despite it proving to be controversial.

Who needs the All Blacks to perform the Haka when you have these ‘hard as’ (as we say in NZ) gingerbread men strutting their stuff, doing the Haka in an oven to get people to rise to the challenge and vote for their favourite bakery in the New Zealand Bakery of the Year 2007 competition. These gingerbread guys have been literally baked so hard that their performing amongst their own crumbs bouncing around in the oven.

The first challenge was to get the bakeries to register online to receive an entry package for the competition. When registered each bakery was assigned a unique number to identify them for judging and voting purposes. Voting could take place by either public texting, online voting or voting in store at the bakeries. A special ‘Peoples Choice Bakery of the Year’ award would be determined by online and text voting only. The next challenge was to get people to vote for their favourite bakery. What better way to try and get people to vote than by doing some TV advertising showing the Gingerbread Haka animated video. At the end of this video people are enticed (by being able to win a $500 travel voucher) to vote for their favourite bakery by going to www.bakeryoftheyear.co.nz. Here people were encouraged to spread the bakery challenge by filling in the online form and sending the Gingerbread Haka video to their friends. This word-of-mouth, viral marketing part proved to be so vital for this campaign.

With this video having around 100 people upload it to YouTube and MySpace respectively and it reaching in excess of 300,000 views on YouTube (at the time of writing) the campaigns viral marketing aspect was successful in getting people talking about what they thought of the Gingerbread Haka animation. Looking at some of the 300 comments posted on YouTube and various mentions in blogs, some people found the advert cute, cool, or hard case funny. Other people thought the animated video was culturally insensitive and politically incorrect for various reasons. This in turn added controversy around the advert and gave more attention to the campaign itself. The advert even got a mention on TV3 News. Now, when your ad gets talked about on prime time TV News, you get alot of exposure and it doesn’t seem to matter if it is positive or negative exposure. One can’t help to think that people might have walked right into the advertisers hands on this one.

The funny thing is that, even though there are about 300 sites linking to the animation on YouTube, there does not appear to be much talk about it on any of the larger social bookmarking sites. At the time of writing there are 2 posts on del.icio.us, 5 diggs on digg, a couple of mentions in Reddit, 21 scoops on Scoopit and no mentions on the New Zealand based social bookmarking sites sharemyNZ or Sniff It. But then again, I’m not sure if sharemyNZ or Sniff It even existed when the The New Zealand Bakery of the Year campaign was released.

Bond & Bond has rolled out a campaign about 3 months ago on its website – “This Week’s Top 10 Killer Deals” along with a campaign site – KillerDeals.co.nz. It is a fantastic idea to engage customers and attract returning visitors to the site. For a company like Bond & Bond who has very good brand awareness in New Zealand, plus some really good deals, the campaign site should go very well. However, is it a real killer yet? Can it be even more killing? Let’s find out.

First of all, let’s look at some figures of the campaign site – www.killerdeals.co.nz.

• PageRank – 0/10
• No. of indexed pages on Google – 2
• No. of indexed pages on Yahoo! – 1
• No. of indexed pages on Live Search – 1
• External backlinks reported by Google - 0
• External backlinks reported by Yahoo! – 80 (70 of them are from Bond & Bond website)
• Blog mentions – 0
• Social bookmarks – 0

By having lots of 0s and near 0 numbers, the campaign is definitely not doing its full potential. There are huge opportunities sitting behind. What can they do to make it fly? Of course, online marketing is the answer. But I’ll dig into the solutions by looking at three important online marketing aspects – SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and SMO (Social Media Optimisation).

SEO

You may be wondering why the search engine index is so bad for killerdeals.co.nz. Simple answer, the entire site is a Flash file. There is no single live letter on the site. Search engines cannot read all other contents very well except plain text. So the site has been missing a lot of traffic opportunities from search engines. Nowadays, no one can afford to leave out the search engine traffic, cannot we?

Google can read Flash files at certain extent but very poorly. The above example is how Google reads the Flash file of killerdeal.co.nz. By having lots of “click Me” and “Buy Me” shown, it looks a little bit spammy, isn’t it?

I admit the Flash they built is kind of cool with all the mouse-over actions. But again, the whole site cannot be a single Flash. They need to change the site structure to a normal HTML site with real headings (especially H1), text copies and text links etc. They can still keep the Flash for each item instead of the normal product image, but with product descriptions in plain text.

Search engines love permanent text copy to determine the theme of the page and fresh content to keep the site live, like humans do. Each week’s top 10 is the prefect live content. An introductory copy will also be essential. They can also archive the expired specials with current prices and group them by categories and link back to Bond & Bond site. The category pages can be used as a place to introduce category level specials and/or vouchers.

From SEO’s point of view, we don’t want the campaign site to compete with the Bond & Bond site for search traffic. It will need to position itself as a heavy promotion site which is not the primary focus of the original Bond & Bond site. Good use of page titles, headings, keywords, unique content etc. will help them to achieve the goal.

You may want to argue that it’s a micro-site that doesn’t need to look and function like a normal website. It’s right, for a normal short life micro-site, we won’t need to worry much about SEO. But for a site like killerdeals.co.nz, it desires to act well and live forever. If Bond & Bond can optimise the site well, they’ll build up a real deal site and community over time and enjoy the free and unlimited search traffic day by day. Then they’ll be one step closer to be a real killer.

Of course, the real action won’t be as simple as I described above. It requires lots of detailed planning and twisting to make it shine. Feel free to leave your comments here or contact us for more discussions.

In the next posts, I’ll continue discussing the other killer weapons – SEM and SMO.