Posted by kfarrar@hubspot.com on Fri, Mar 07, 2008 @ 01:49 PM
Those of us who are not blessed with a DVR have been bombarded with
Presidential Campaign television spots for months on end. We’ve also been exposed to the campaigns
through other media including our local and national news, newspapers, and the
internet. Most of us have even gone to a
candidate’s website to actually learn about where they stand on the important
issues.
I don’t know about you, but when a campaign spot comes on during the
commercials I usually flip the channel or get up to grab a snack. These spots are just not that entertaining
after the first 100 or so. That’s why I
was so surprised to turn on The Today Show the other morning as I was getting
ready for work and find that one of the featured interviews was with Casey
Knowles, the 17 year old young woman who was unknowingly featured in Hillary
Clinton’s “Children” television spot.
The campaign used old stock footage that included shots of Casey when
she was 8 years old. Turns out Casey is
an avid Obama supporter and wasn’t all that happy to be one of the stars of the
show.
Now what’s really ironic is this campaign spot originally aired only in
Texas last week before the primaries. It
wasn’t even being shown nationally. If John
Stewart’s “The Daily Show” hadn’t done a spoof on the ad Casey’s family wouldn’t
have even seen it. (She’s from
Washington State.) Now the spot has
aired on every major news show in the nation, and doing a search on YouTube
brings up dozens of additional spoofs on the ad as well as the original which
has now been viewed more than 824,551 times in less than two weeks.
It’s only fair to mention Clinton’s real
viral marketing campaign here as well.
Oh… you didn’t hear about that one?
Me either.
This article on ZDNet does a great job covering it if you’re interested: ZDNet
My point is, viral marketing is kind of like that saying “You can lead a
horse to water but you can’t make him drink.” You can have all the right intentions of
designing a campaign that you think may go viral and spread to the world, but
you just never know what (or who) you’ll get with that old stock footage.
And my vote for the best version of Hillary’s 3 a.m. video is: