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Free Ads Can Be Really Expensive
An anonymous reader writes "Companies are finding that this 'Web 2.0' user participation thing sometimes isn't all its cracked up to be. The New York Times reports on the efforts of big companies to harness consumer enthusiasm for assistance with advertising. Heinz, for example, is running a campaign asking users to submit videos using their product in inventive ways. The problem, of course, is that most of the submissions are utterly terrible. The result is a headache in terms of quality control and making use of the turned in submissions. 'Heinz hopes to show more than five of them, if there are enough that convey a positive, appealing message about Heinz ketchup, he said. But advertising executives who have seen some of the entries say that Heinz may be hard pressed to find any that it is proud to run on television in September. "These are just so bad," said Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive of the Kaplan Thaler Group, an advertising agency in New York that is not involved with Heinz's contest. One of the most viewed Heinz videos -- seen, at last count, more than 12,800 times -- ends with a close-up of a mouth with crooked, yellowed teeth. When Ms. Kaplan Thaler saw it, she wondered, "Were his teeth the result of, maybe, too much Heinz?"'"
Oh no, the people in your free commercial didn't have perfect actors teeth. Welcome to the real world Heinz, what did you expect to get for free from amatures?
Perhaps the "free" part of it is to blame, maybe its more that people that make good videos don't like Heinz enough for make an ad for them?
I mean would you really spend your free time making a video for a ketchup company?
why should customers do Heinz' job? are you telling me that all the money they make and all the ads that they have made count for nothing? companies shouldnt expect their customers to do their work- even for a prize. that isnt their job. on the other hand if they do find something interesting they can always hire them instead of needing to have consumers make the ads for them.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
1. Develop Fanboy culture.
2. Let Fanboyz create adz on their Macz.
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
Actually Heinz has a fanboy culture among many British folks. The mention of 'Heinz Baked Beans' to many is enough to bring fond memories. Now how to turn those folks into video makin' fanboyz for free, that's the question.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
They should just go the other way, and pick out the very worst ones. Something along the the lines of Leonard Pinth-Garnell.
What?
The whole set, from the 'creative idea' to ending up here - an excellent example of 'Progressive Stupidity'.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Sure, we can all RTFG, but the blurb really should include a link to all the videos.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Let me get this straight. These companies want you to make an ad for them, for free on a zero dollar budget and they're complaining that the quality is crap?
Morons.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Small businesses that don't have much money to spend on marketing and advertising can really benefit from "free" advertising techniques (stuff like this). Large enterprises have usually only succesfully ridden free campaign waves when they had already been in place (e.g. diet coke and mentos). Its much more difficult than it seems.
First of all, what did they expect. As Amateur Production is by default, amateur, it isn't going to be professional quality.
Not only that, but the product they are using is flawed as well. Had the product been something very expensive, exclusive, or targeted to a select audience (perhaps amateur directors, script writers, graphic artists, or something...) they would have seen at least some creativity, but this is Heinz, a freakin' ketchup (or catsup as some may prefer).
And for those wishing to see the video, it is in TFA, or here is the direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGY-ubAJSyI
Is it possible that, perhaps, viral video is simply not an effective marketing strategy for FUCKING KETCHUP?
Yeah, this web 2.0 thing is just crap. I mean, you have a multimillion dollar company, and you try to get a bunch of people on the internet excited about your stupid sauce product, and no-one seems to have any enthusiasm for your boring corporate image whatsoever.
All eight people on the internet that ARE excited about your stupid sauce product are just mediocre media creators without the creative vision required to make your stupid sauce product look hip and cool.
Obviously we should just move directly on to web 3.0, where everyone is fucking stoked about sauce products. The top DJs of the world will do entire sets themed on ketchup, mayonnaise, and mustard. Beautiful runway models will gyrate and make kissing faces at your stupid sauce product.
Hells yeh, babies. No more of this web 2.0 BS. It just wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
fifth sigma, inc.
At least 50% of the population is of below average intelligence, and typically, 90% of everything is crap.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
"utterly terrible"
4 9&pageid=5
These are the two words I love most!
And here is one of the many reasons why: http://www.cracked.com/index.php?name=News&sid=16
Fsck the rest.
about stupid hienz ? how much do they think people care?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I'm not surprised that they're not satisfied. It's pretty hard to improve on the free Heinz ads that have already been made: The Goodies Beans Boy ads. I saw these when they were first aired, and they were so effective that I still find myself saying "Get it right!" to people now and then.
They jumped on the Web 2.0 bandwagon, but fell off again. Seems like a lack of research and understanding. At least maybe other companies will learn from it.
Some ad agency start ups might want to do just that.
Deleted
There are too many crappy ones, so here's a few that are less crappy.
The Cute Kids - 23
The Girlfriend - 42
The Fisherman - 45
The Punster - 62
The Ketchup Pass - 65
The Wrestling Brothers - 67
The Dog Food (animated) - 72
The Rappers - 79
The Ninja Kids - 126
The Dirty Joke - 208
The Behind the Scenes - 241
The Hot Hot Hot Girl - 291
When I was in 5th grade, I waited untill the last minute to do my science project.
:)
My mom & her friend decided I was going to see which brand of ketchup dripped the slowest.
I'm proud to say, Heinz ketchup dripped the slowest & thus was the thickest ketchup.
Mark me whatever you want, but this is proof that my shitty last minute science project was truely ahead of its' time & I should have got a fucking A++.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I don't see the problem - it means a cross between an amateur and an auteur.
There is really not much creative use to which you can put a bottle of ketchup (that would be fit for a G-rated audience), is there? Garbage In / Garbage Out. Oh, and one more tip for Heinz: if you are going to try to "harness" the power of audience enthusiasm, it helps not slag off the unprofessionalism of all your entries in public. Guess what just happened to all of the enthusiasm of everybody who read that insult? If you're going to truck with the mob, you have to find a way to appreciate the mob. And don't give them a lame-o assignment to start with.
"Oh dear, our giant corporation can't convince enough people to make quality advertising for us at home for no money at all."
Does anyone else have the sudden urge to start submitting videos in which a person is holding a bottle of said ketchup while screaming terrible, terrible swear words? If we can get a couple hundred of those, I think the consumer ultimately wins.
Note that they're offering $57,000 to the best ad, so the comments of "what do they expect for free" are somewhat misplaced.
... ads for free....meaning the ones who are to buy the product are the ones to create the ads for it, without pay.
Did I miss something or are they just trying to emulate the software development process.
1) get others to come up with ideas for free.
2) sell it to them.
3) profit
What Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive of the Kaplan Thaler Group,is missing out on is: ,bye bye.Send us a card from the land of obsolete cliches.
We are tired of and numb the old paradigm that we will all be successful,look younger,be trimmer and have a perfect life if we use their brand of soap.
Real people react more positively to each other than their celluloid airbrushed counterparts in commercial land.
Linda Kaplan Thaler represents an old school that doesn't know it's extinct.Kinda like Network TV.Unfortunatly for us this means we still have to endure madison avenue assuming we're all morons in ads,till they finally go away.
Linda and others like her tho,after spending a mint on education and keeping up with all the
(obviously skewed)statistics will continue to hold on to their ideas carved in stone while the world passes them by.Oh well
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
A commercial that associates a wholesome, all-American product with having a threesome?
A commercial that ends in a teenage squirting a friend with ketchup all over his face?
These "less crappy" links are pretty horrible.
Thanks for the links. Now I understand what the article was talking about.
Seems to me that if you wanted to pick up a quick $57,000, it wouldn't be too hard to come up with a clever idea that also gives positive association with the product.
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
Unless they said they will use the clips unedited and without alteration (and if they did say that, they should fire their lawyers...nobody says that), they can do a bit of digital editing to make their ad appeal a bit more to their needs. The contest fine print undoubtedly says something along the lines of "All submissions become the property of Heinz Inc.", so I don't see what the problem is. Even if there was a 'horrible outcry' over their 'deception', it's has nothing negative to do with their actual food product, and they'd just have that much more exposure in the media. I totally don't see the problem.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
Silly Ad exectutives, this just goes to show just how fake things are that are "typically" on TV and other ad mediums.
<start bitter rant>
Go walk down the street and look inside someone's home and you don't see the Better Homes version of a living space, or anything like what is shown on ads.
Take a close-up face photo of 10 people on the street, and you see that the image we've been sold by ads is completely fake. People simply do not look like they do on tv and in magazines. Lately this has gotten worse with the fsck-doll 23yo models reading the news on cnn and fox.
The whole image and world these ad-oriented people live in is fake - their whole career is about overtly lying to people to get them to buy stuff they don't want or need. "Boo hoo, the real world won't sell our red-colored corn syrup mixture with processed tomato paste..." yes, boo hoo.
</rant>
Maybe they're just shocked at finally finding out who the core market for ketchup really is. It's not those thin and toned muscular people like on TV. That's a rare breed, I've never even met one myself, though I see them on TV and in the movies. It's your good ole' fat, diabetic, round-bellied, yellow-toothed American. Slaving away at some crappy job, coming home exhausted, and collapsing with the TV and Jim Beam. That's who is guzzling down those giant Walmart-sized ketchup bottles. More power to 'em!
http://junglevision.com -- Shamus for Gameboy
What is the single strangest thing I can do with ketchup?
"why should customers do Heinz' job? "
Why should a bunch of people write code and release it to the public for free.
Why should a musician create some music and release it for free.
"companies shouldnt expect their customers to do their work- even for a prize. that isnt their job. "
You missed the subtle point. Quality costs. You get what you pay for.
What happened to the YES tag?
I shall link to my roomates nearly complete entry: here.
I mean, sure it's not national TV quality, but I'd take it over a local ad anyday
Most people are complete idiots who overestimate their abilitites, yet have no idea of what's good and what isn't. Most user-generated content is worthless for precisely this reason.
Well, you _are_ right, but, see, that's the whole rub, right there. The Web 2.0 hype is basically the future is a tehnofetishist collaboration utopia. That a million monkeys... err... amateurs on keyboards can, and _will_, produce something better than Shakespeare and better texts/ads/information/whatever than professional scientists/historians/marketters/whatever manage.
[sarcasm]Authoritative sources and professionals publishing content are soo last century, don't you know? The future is all wikis, blogs, YouTube, MySpace and BitTorrent! That's what separated companies that failed in the bubble from companies that survived, don't you know? You can still forget about actually having a product to sell, the New Economy still lives, you just have to put your money on companies that let a million amateurs cooperate! That's the ticket![/sarcasm]
And if you think I'm a loonie in need of a lobotomy with the above surrealistic paragraph, you'd be half right. Except it's not me, it's literally Tim O'Reilly's vision of Web 2.0. You know, since he's the one who coined and trademarked the Web 2.0 buzzword. No, seriously. You can't make up something _that_ disconnected from reality.
Never mind that in reality the companies that survived were the ones which had, you know, a business plan and a product to sell. E.g., Google didn't survive the bubble age simply because it allowed people to find each other easier. It survived really because it also was an ad provider, and it had a business plan and a product: it sells your eyeballs to the ad providers.
But I suppose that _that_ didn't fit in Tim's technofetishist utopian view, so let's not let reality get in the way of a jolly good utopia.
At any rate, yeah, you _are_ right: what did anyone expect?
Well, the Web 2.0 technofetishist crowd actually expected that it would produce the ultimate ad, nailing the coffin of professionals producing professional content. That a million monkeys remixing each other's home videos, and occasionally someone else's music and a WoW film, would actually be not just top notch, but redefine top notch. They'd show Heinz what a next gen ad looks like.
That's basically the story. It didn't work like the Web 2.0 hype predicted it would work.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In the traditional sense, of course this type of "free advertising" doesn't seem to be working from the Heinz perspective. They entered the "web 2.0 viral marketing" fray by asking users to create an Ad posted on the Web to be shown on TV, a whole different medium.
The problem is, "viral marketing" is exactly the opposite of a television advertising. "Viral Marketing" happens when word of mouth from spreads positive feedback over some sort of product to many, many people, usually in a short amount of time. With respect to viral marketing and the internet, "word of mouth" can mean e-mailing a link to an interesting video or news article to ten friends who each in turn pass it on to five other friends, and so on. This rapid type of communication is what drives today's internet driven viral marketing.
In as sense, even though using viral marketing as a device instead of traditional marketing doesn't cost any less, it's likely just as effective, if not more. For example, the buzz created around the user-created-ad contest itself works to advertise the Heinz brand because of the number of people the contest reaches: First, the people who contribute to making the videos, Then the thousands of people who watch the videos and send links of the guy smearing ketchup all over his face to their friends. This creates a snowball effect of people who view these ads and become even more familiar with the heinz brand(yeah, yeah, who isn't already?). This is the essense of Viral marketing, and it sure works great once it gets rolling.
It isn't surprising that Heinz is having trouble finding an ad suitable for TV. In today's state of television advertising, the one in which both advertisers and the consumers expect professionally produced and directed, as described in the article, videos made with home-movie quality cameras and sound just don't cut it. The problem with the contest is that Heinz tries to bring unprofessional ads to a medium that thrives on polished professional ads. The internet, on the other hand, thrives on normal people who can create content just as accessible to thousands and millions of people as professionally created web content. Every advertiser knows the internet is a gold mine of consumers and Heinz does too. Their contest is working for them just fine, especially now with all this media attention, but they should have stayed away from the television, because viral marketing just doesn't work there.
- like bad teeth, too?
Jack Rickard, erstwhile publisher of Boardwatch Magazine, upon first grokking HTML 1.0.
Watch the transforming girl
>> But advertising executives who have seen some of the entries say that Heinz may be hard pressed to find any that it is proud to run on television in September.
Welcome to the real world. No-one actually looks like those perfect families in TV ads, so no home movies will actually look like that. Maybe Heinz needs to take this opportunity to be a pioneer and break the mold of stupidly unrealistic tv advertising.
Oh wow. I used to have a low opinion of marketdroids and others who work in the advertising world. I guess it wasn't low, because now it's really down there. These Heinz droids suck so bad at their jobs that they want their potential customers to do their work for them, for free. Whatever. I'm going to sleep for 100 years, wake me up if anything starts making sense before 2107.