Thursday, October 15th, 2009
Fun new campaign from VW: The Fun Theory
A great new campaign has been floating around on the Internet. The Fun Theory is made up of captivating videos that promote simple, fun, ways to change people’s behaviors for the better. The first video has a stairway that is a piano and it plays the notes as you step on them.
Aside for the humor and the amount people who took the stairs, these kind of campaigns are very exciting. Advertising and promotions that encourage interaction without being intrusive, in my mind, are the most effective. The old model of interrupting people’s time is both annoying and generates clutter. TV commercials, radio spots, and newspaper ads get lost in the mix by casting a large net to reach a few folks in the target market. Conversely, new media has the ability to reach people who are interested in your message. This does not mean print is dead, but it is beginning to reverse the push marketing culture to a landscape of audiences seeking out information. We already see this with Google AdSense and Facebook ads, but on some websites, such as Hulu.com, they have turned it up a notch. At the beginning of one of the shows it gave me a choice of which set of ads I would like to see throughout the program. Although this is not ideal, it is a step in the right direction for promotions to give audiences control over the messages they would like to receive. Social media, user generated content, reviews, etc. all give power to audiences by deciding what is good or bad. In turn, this gives creditability to company messages thus making it more effective and benefiting both consumer and advertiser. VW’s Fun Theory is going to be an interesting campaign to watch as well as how it will blossom into the full campaign. The videos are spreading across the Internet creating buzz…it sparked my interest enough to blog about it!
