Toyota’s Engagement Campaign with YouTube

April 8, 2008 | By Marc Porcelli | No Comments »

Knowledge @ Wharton published by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania provides some great analysis of current business trends. I frequency read the Marketing section and would encourage all readers to subscribe to their RSS feed here.

Of particular interest was an article by the publication titled, Getting Engaged: Advertisers Search for Their Voices on YouTube. I recently blogged about engagement and conversational advertising on social networks. I felt it had questionable uses, as the results could not be reliably tracked. After reading this article, I have a slightly different perspective.

Toyota, according to the article via the Wall Street Journal, spent upwards of $4 million dollars on the creation of two campaigns on YouTube. The first campaign is called Sketchies II offers cash and prizes valued at $40,000 for the best user-generated comedy sketch. Comedians and entertainers from the YouTube community will choose 20 semi-finalists. The
YouTube community will then vote on the top 10, who will make a second three-minute video.

The part of the campaign that caught my attention was that Toyota did not push their product in my face when I went to the Sketchies II page. In fact it was quite the opposite, the article from Knowledge@Wharton stats, “But when it comes to the user-created videos themselves, the 2009 Corolla is nowhere to be found. In “Bard Spring Break,” the college guys are driving a Honda. In another finalist video, “Shotgun Song,” three guys fight over who will get to sit in the front seat of their friend’s BMW. The soft touch on branding, of course, may be part of Toyota’s strategy. Kim McCullough, Toyota’s corporate manager for marketing communications, told The Wall Street Journal, “If you just bombard these sites with traditional advertising, you are going to turn off the customers, and that is not what any of us want to do.”” I cannot agree with this statement more. Users are sick and tired of being bombarded by traditional advertising. Toyota, through their agency Saatchi & Saatchi of NY who created this campaign, understood the importance of genuinely engaging the user. So many advertisers online are so fearful of hurting their brands, something that of course is valid. What Toyota has done and I believe has succeeding with is letting go of the control! This is social marketing at is best.

The second aspect of Toyota’s campaign is called Best In Jest, which is a compilation of the funniest YouTube videos of the week. This campaign is more conservative in its nature. Wharton’s marketing professor Jonah Berger states in the article “That’s a more traditional route, and a safe one. It creates positive brand associations, but because it’s less risky, the returns are also not as high.” Toyota by incorporating a more risqué campaign such as “Sketchies II” is able to benchmark against the “Best in Jest” campaign. The most appealing aspect of the campaigns for me is the availability of metrics.

The Toyota campaigns can arguably be 100% measured. Wharton Professor of operations and management Kartik Hosangar points out “Every YouTube video is encased in an array of metrics, including how many times a video has been watched, “favorited,” subscribed to or honored, and anyone who sets up a free YouTube account can leave a comment below the video window. With social video-sharing sites, “The risk of negative word-of-mouth is real. Someone else can observe if no one has watched your video, or they can post a message saying, ‘This video sucks, and so does [your product].’” There is of course risk in this and that must be weighed against the benefits. Toyota clearly weighed these benefits and it appears to be paying off.

Traditionally we see a lot of companies creating sections on MySpace, Facebook and YouTube that are safe in their nature for the brand in that they have complete control or edit users interactions before they go live. The article provides great perspective on this. “Hosanagar points out that many companies choose to advertise through YouTube in non-interactive ways, such as using banner ads, in-video ads — when a short ad plays before a requested video — or ads that appear throughout the video in the bottom inch of the video player.” It is not that these “safe campaigns” can’t work, they just are less likely to work, brands and advertisers need to give up the control.

I was very impressed with the article and especially with Saatchi & Saatchi and Toyota for stepping up and tacking some risk.

I am curious what readers of this blog think about the two campaigns!

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Category: Advertising Agencies, Creatives, Social Networking, Video Advertising

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