Please sir... can I have some more budget?

More often than not, an agency junior will be tasked with handling the online distribution (because he/she is on Facebook a lot and used to be really into Mxit) and they'll upload a poorly compressed video to the brutal world of YouTube all by itself with dogfoodadforclient.mp4 as its title and maybe a key word if it's lucky. Then everyone sits back and wonders why it only has two views (probably from the agency itself) and it did not set the internet alight, like it did in the client review last week.

Unfortunately, this in turn has led to a bit of a negative perception in the marketing world of spending time and money putting any video into the online space because the perceived returns are pretty low.

As someone whose job is selling the benefits of online to clients, I'm always looking for real life case studies, data and information to prove to our clients why they should start to take digital distribution a bit more seriously. So I thought I'd share a few insights and observations from one of our recent jobs.

A small sized campaign

We just started a small sized campaign for a local SA pet food manufacturer which is not a product category that historically invests huge amounts in online. The original creative concept from the ad agency (humankind) is great and we're lucky to have a three way partnership where each service provider values each other's contribution and wants to make the whole campaign a success.

To make sure the advert got the online exposure that we felt it deserved, we decided to link the video to a 'watch to give' campaign so that users had a reason to share the video and talk about it, rather than just watch it for a quick laugh and then go off looking for more dog videos. For every view the video gets on YouTube (up to 10 000 views), the dog food company, Montego, will give R1 to a charity called Barking Mad who do really great work at placing stray and abandoned dogs with new families.

Nothing revolutionary in the concept, but a chance for online users to watch dog videos and adverts on YouTube while feeling smug about actually helping pets find homes. By doing this we're incentivising the individual to watch and share the video while costing the company way less per view (R1) than they'd be paying for an Adwords paid for result click on Google search (about R10 CPC in the well contested dog food categories) ... and we're helping animals at the same time - saving money and animals at the same time.

We're not expecting our YouTube stats to compete with DStv viewer figures but managed to get over 2000 views within 24hrs and just about reached our monthly target of 10 000 views within a week. We're running a very small scale YouTube advertising campaign to boost organic search traffic and we also promote our posts on Facebook but the bulk of exposure has come from users sharing the video with their friends so that they can give as much money to charity as possible.

In the first 24hrs we had 77 individual pieces of positive consumer feedback and the marketing message has been exposed to 17 039 people via the usual social media suspects. The whole campaign will give us some more detailed analytics, but so far things are looking good and most importantly the trifecta of the customer, client and agency are all happy.

First 24hrs

A week later

It's not a battle of traditional TV vs digital distribution, it's about getting all the campaign elements to work together, exposing the hard work everyone puts into the campaign to as many people as possible.

I'm always happy because online viewers have chosen to watch the advert and not had it forced upon them between reruns of Binnelanders and I can call the client and show great stats about genuine customer engagement in the online space ... all from a simple YouTube extension of a traditional advertising campaign.