Comments on: Numbers prove success of Flip’s Bondi flashmob

By: TonyMacaroni

TonyMacaroni — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:29:46 +0000

Hey Darren,

you mentioned “…been successful in driving awareness of the product among its target audience”…sorry but I could not find anything relating to the product in the ad, so from my point of view the ad was a total failure as it didn’t relate anything to it.

Then when I found out via the Mumbrella forums that it was for a flip video gadget, it completely turned me off because the actual video quality and camera work was so shoddy.

So although I watched it twice, the ad did nothing for me – you’re right people will watch anything if it gets some buzz behind it, but saying you can’t track and directly link every piece of marketing effort to sales or awareness of a product is not entirely correct. I’ve been involved in plenty of marketing campaigns across TV, mobile, web, banner-ads, billboards, flyers – you name it, and on the majority of them we’ve successfully tracked them through to website visits, signups, sales, requested demos, sales leads, increases in customer databases etc.etc. Granted you nearly always have to make 1 or 2 assumptions but with sound logic and reasoning behind statistics, and using a solid analystics & tracking solution you can determine whether something has been a success.

Another good point from Andrew as well – have they followed this up with a mainstream media campaign of any sort? I haven’t seen anything as well, and thinking about it…I still can’t recall the name of the device anywhere!

By: Andrew Juma

Andrew Juma — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:43:03 +0000

They should have followed it up with mainstream media because I have not seen the flip camera anywhere.

By: Darren Paterson

Darren Paterson — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:08:34 +0000

Tony, if only every piece of the marketing effort could be directly linked to sales! Unfortunately, we are almost certainly never going to achieve that. Instead each aspect of the communications solution is assigned a more acjhievable goal and corresponding metric… like views in this case.. and when it achieves those it is said to have been successful in driving awareness of the product among its target audience.. of course the hope is that this translates into sales.. but you can lead a horse to water…

By: John Grono

John Grono — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 05:20:47 +0000

… and numbers that would get a TV programme axed … just providing some perspective.

By: Darren Paterson

Darren Paterson — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 05:13:31 +0000

.. and I think that is testimony to the fact that:
a) it can be tricky to correctly predict the success or otherwise of any marketing idea when you’re in the industry
b) some people will watch literally anything
c) I’m sure there’s a c).. and a d)..

By: TonyMacaroni

TonyMacaroni — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 04:19:13 +0000

Considering this piece of promo was for a flip video camera, I’d like to see some further stats for the said camera before saying if this was a success or not.

Just because the promo created some buzz and it gets some hits on YouTube, does not make it a success – the proof of the pudding is in how much more traffic to the video camera website or actual sales of the camera it created. From my memory of the ad as well, I couldn’t see any actual link from the flashmob to the camera, other than I thought the ad was very badly shot, so in that sense it could be a complete flop?

Thoughts?!