Meerkats benefit from viral injection
You’ll be hard pressed to miss the latest viral marketing campaign from insurance comparison site comparethemarket.com. The ads, which began appearing on Youtube around Christmas time and which have now migrated onto mainstream TV, feature a spoof site called comparethemeerkat.com.
The premise of the ad is that the Meerkat presenter (a CGI creation called Aleksandr, complete with Russian accent) is fed up with people confusing his Meerkat comparison site with the well known insurance version.
This could all be dismissed as frivolous fun but there is some inspired marketing creative behind the campaign. London agency VCCP were tasked with a single minded proposition – increase the amount of people searching for comparethemarket.com by name via Google.
In a crowded space comparethemarket.com were finding that similar sounding competition with an almost identical proposition were watering down it’s Internet search traffic – a vital element of it’s overal customer base. VCCP therefore decided to employ viral marketing techniques by setting up what appeared to be a spoof site and waiting for the social networking buzz and ‘pass it on effect’ to set in, before finally releasing the ad on terrestrial television.
Cliff Hall, director at VCCP, says, “Much of the previous communications in the category had become formulaic. This creative challenges category conventions. It is a great example of how quality creative will have a direct effect on a client’s business. comparethemarket.com has a strong offering for consumers and is well respected as a partner by insurance brands – this way we can help it become an even more efficient business.”
I’ve seen similarly impressive results from some of my own viral campaigns. A Christmas shoot ‘em up game called StopDerek! that we produced at qube (in the absence of being able to get a paper card produced in time for the festive season) was initially mailed to 900 recipients. Six months later the site was getting 200,000 hits a day.
Viral marketing may not be right for every brand. Successful campaigns tend to be a little ‘edgy’ or left field and this can frighten off many customers. However, for the right brand, there is no more efficient way of spreading awareness. What these campaigns also illustrate is that this is a fast moving space. As the lumbering giants of marketing are just starting to wake up to digital as a viable platform the small, fleet-footed agencies are already moving the whole game forward by embracing web 2.0 and the social networking revolution.
Links:
http://www.comparethemarket.com/
http://www.comparethemeerkat.com/
http://www.leerendell.co.uk/clientzone/stopderek/
