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.