I heard this case study during a presentation at a conference—I believe it was Blognomics 2007—and recently again when the Dutch division of OMD gave a presentation at the University of Applied Science Utrecht (International Communication and Media). In this case study Sony hired OMD in order to promote the new Playstation 3 before the big launch in The Netherlands. Of course, the internet was full of buzz about the device, price and launch date. Trying to tap into that conversation, OMD started a Playstation 3 category—sponsored by Sony—on the forum of, the immensely popular tech-website, Tweakers.net.
Since the forum is mainly about technology and the latest gadgets—I generalize a bit—tapping into the conversation should be, in theory, a smart move to make. Unfortunately this backfired. Members of the forum started to complain because they felt that their community was being commercialized and invaded. This is something that can be understood, since the forum is a place where the tech savvy help each other free of charge. What I understood from OMD is that they thought of pulling the plug and leave the forum.
Eventually they did not. OMD tried one last thing by simply asking the members what do you want? This restarted the conversation. On top of that OMD and Sony started, amongst other things, a competition where members could win a day at Sony to talk to game developers and play with the Playstation 3 before the big launch. When the campaign was over, they had to close the Playstation 3 category on the forum. However some of the members asked OMD if it could leave it online a little longer. OMD did.
Tapping into the conversation can indeed be a powerful thing, especially in the social media era. Simply interrupting a ongoing conversation with a sponsored message can go wrong. Advertisers should be aware that this can backfire. When two people, in a restaurant, are having a personal conversation you also do not interrupt them with a sponsored message. Will advertising ever be able to tap into the conversation? Leave a comment, and while you’re at it drink a nice cool tasty Coca Cola, I know I will.
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Cheers!
This is a interesting case, since lots of agencies try to engage the public by promoting products and services ‘on their level’. They do this by means of publishing ‘fake’ or intrusive messages. The key here is honesty and transparency. People don’t like to be made fool of. Two examples are mentioned in this post on ReadWriteWeb.
Personally, I think don’t know if companies are able to tap into the conversation. If they do it with transparency and honesty, it might backfire as well as people might not believe them or discard it as ‘just another ad’. On the other hand, there are working examples. StarbucksIdea comes to mind.
The case was indeed interesting. Not many cases are found where things almost went wrong. Looking at advertisers that deliberately try to use viral marketing there must be a hundred cases by now.
StarbucksIdea is indeed a good success story but it is a company that created a community around a product instead of invading a current community. I think conversations will be more important in the future but more subtle then this case study.