There’s a tempest in a teapot that’s being stirred up over the use of comments from YouTube in the marketing campaign for One Week, a travelogue-type movie being released solely in Canada (for now). The comments are drawn from the movie’s trailer on YouTube and this tactic seems to have rubbed everyone the wrong way.
For the life of me I can’t figure out why.
Authority and relevance are increasingly, in the eyes of the audience, two things that belong more to peer reviewers (whether you’re talking about movies or vacumn cleaners) than to either professional reviewers or the company itself. Marketers are embracing word-of-mouth in their campaigns and finding ways to leverage that.
In the movie industry you have more and more film advertising that’s using reviews form online-only publications and blogs to pull quotes from. So it’s a just a short jump from there to embracing user comments and using them in the marketing materials.
In the larger world of consumer brands, too, the consumer’s voice is being leveraged in marketing campaigns. The biggest and most recent example is Skittles, where the homepage for the candy brand was (and still is) a rotating mix of Twitter search results, a Facebook page and a Wikipedia page. You can read more on this from Shel Holtz (in favor) and Joseph Jaffe (not so much).
We’ve moved from marketing campaigns that featured pull quotes from professional reviewers to ones that featured pull quotes from non-professional reviewers to, now, one that features pull quotes from fans. All those campaigns, of course, will use the most positive and enthusiastic reviews because, naturally, all the comments pass through the filter of marketers in their journey between the media of first publication to the paid advertising spot. All that means is that marketing is moving along the same evolutionary path as media in general.
It’s a big deal, yeah, but not in a bad way. It just means that the movie industry – and the car industry and the beauty industry and most other industries – realize the power of influence has shifted and is adjusting their marketing accordingly.
[Pic of the ad courtesy from Craig, who doesn't seem to be a fan of the tactic.]
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