I spend a lot of time speaking and consulting on agile marketing–what I wrote about a lot in Do It Wrong Quickly–and I often use the example of television commercials as the very antithesis of agile marketing, the epitome of old media. Agile marketing is all about experimentation, feedback, testing, data–just about the opposite of anything you can do with TV commercials. While you certainly can run tests for commercials and you can get some data, it is very expensive and very late in the process. But all that is changing.
More and more, TV commercials are being viewed online as much or more than on TV, meaning that the feedback process available for agile marketing is now possible for TV commercials, too. The hottest ad of this year’s Super Bowl, from Volkswagen, has garnered over 50 million views on YouTube, which is almost half of the number of viewers who watched the game. Chipotle premiered a commercial on YouTube that has gotten six million views–and it is over two minutes long. I am not sure it has been shown on TV in any form.
So, what’s happening here?
Yes, the viewing numbers still seem relatively small, compared to TV, but remember, the price is zero–a lot less than buying TV ad time. But something else is at work here.
Viral videos are the new badge of honor among ad agencies. It’s one thing to pay to have an ad aired and rack up big viewership numbers. It’s another thing to have viewers voluntarily watch your commercial on their own, with no TV show surrounding it that really catches their attention.
So, if even TV advertisers are moving online and watching their ads grow in popularity one happy viewer at a time, perhaps billboards are next…
