Reach and Frequency, be damned

I used to work with Microsoft and sometimes joked that they didn't actually need to advertise at all. They just needed to do lots and lots of focus groups with the media budget. They could talk to the same number of people, it might cost a bit more but the behavioural shifts would win me an Effie before you could say boo.

Anyway, that's one alternative media strategy.

Another is to stick your ads on YouTube and hope that vast droves come and watch.



This is a little video of some peoples' stick puppets singing a song about Harry Potter. Juan Cabral is nowhere to be found. Just look at the number of views. 37 million and counting.

Why? Perhaps because the subject matter is close to the hearts of the audience. Perhaps because its not branded. Perhaps because its genuine and not slick. Brands take note. If you stick stuff on YouTube to get the audience hyped before the ad airs, make sure it's more interesting than a sock puppet in someone's bedroom.

Are Penguin the new Innocent?

OK I must be the last one in the world to put all the pieces together.

We've all been blogging and writing presentations and brand models that unpack, deconstruct and reassemble Innocent in the minutest detail.

But I think there's a new kid on the block. One that doesn't have a planning guru (that I know of) at the helm, but a brand that really gets the new world of marketing.

And it's Penguin.

I've just received the Clay Shirky book to review and blog - (thanks Rachelc for the image) and in so doing, the distributed web presence created by this marketing tactic becomes a living case study for the book's main tenets.


But it's all the other stuff, separate but coherent that makes it pure planning gold. They just do all the stuff we spend our lives trying to persuade 'brand' marketers to do.

I think all my digital strategies are going to look a little bit like this in future.