Marketing Assignment Gone Viral! by Michelle Au

As I sit at my desk and procrastinate (again) I often go check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzgzZCKFcm8

One of our assignments for our MBA marketing class was to create a spoof video of a product. At first, my team (Ken Lee, Allan Olson, Shell Lau, Tina Sun, Weijia Liu) was quite lost as to what we would do. Our group is quite “techie” and it was hard to divert ourselves off talking about new technologies and gadgets. We talked about making fun of the Windows 7 commercials (Windows 7, it was my idea), Apple, and of course, my beloved Blackberry.

In the end, we decided to spoof Blackberry. We had some ideas for the other concepts, however, we were able to come up with something concrete and with a little humour for the Blackberry. Also, the Blackberry model we decided to spoof (Blackberry Torch) was recently released in Canada. We wanted to focus on a product that had been in the media recently, so we can ride the coat tails of real advertisements while YouTube viewers were searching for “Blackberry Torch”.

As some of you know, the older Blackberry’s used a trackball, which was notorious for not working properly. We decided to do a play on words. Our concept was to have Ken and Weijia talking about the malfunctioning balls while using the urinal. It just seemed fitting to have guys talking about their malfunctioning balls while in the bathroom. HaHa

At the time of writing, we had 35,175 views, the highest in Bus 702 history!! We were not expecting our video to get anything close to this.

Being an obsessed Blackberry lover, I frequent the Crackberry Blog (www.crackberry.com) everyday. Their forums are filled with equally obsessed users who write applications, create themes, and discuss all things Blackberry. I created a post in the forum the first day our video was uploaded. I didn’t think much of it. It was posted in the Off-Topic Section. I personally don’t visit this section often, so I assumed the same for others. However, the first person to respond to my plea for views was the forum moderator. Still, I thought nothing of it. Later in the day, as I was scrolling through Crackberry (again), what do I see, but Weijia’s face front and center!! I thought I had clicked onto YouTube by mistake, but after I realized I was still on the Crackberry Blog, it dawned on me that WE WERE ON THE BLOG!!! http://crackberry.com/spoof-commercial-without-trackballs-you-get-done-more

We had hit the jackpot!! Crackberry gets 1 million views a day! It was unbelievable how quickly the number of views climbed. we were near 2000 views by the end of the first day. At the end of the first week, we were at 25,000 views!!

Apart from getting on the Crackberry blog, Tina had also posted on www.6park.com. This is a Chinese forum that catered to Chinese ex-pats, and to locals who knew how to set up a proxy (This website can’t pass through the firewall in China). We were able to garner about 10,000 views through this website.

We also focused our key words on videos that have been getting a lot of views. With Ken singing his rendition of Lady Gaga’s Poker Face, we decided to put her name in as a key word. This way, viewers who searched Lady Gaga would get our video as one of the results.

What did we learn from this experience? Besides luck, successful marketing requires the marketer to have a pulse on what is happening in the industry you’re marketing to. It is also essential to have a network in that industry too. For our particular assignment, we were not ashamed to simply ask for clicks and support!!

To read the full article on this event, go to: http://business.sfu.ca/news/post.php?id=2174