This week’s Business Class Topic is Marketing and in the
blog we are to talk about marketing campaigns. We discussed a special kind of
marketing using internet videos that people send or recommend to each other,
using for it an expression that has become as popular as what it describes: “viral”.
For a video to go viral,
mostly, it has to be funny.
That’s exactly why making a successful advertising campaign using one of these is so difficult, because comedy
is nothing easy. Consequently, you can’t have a proper control over whether a
video is going to go viral or going to be a failure, but you could use some
tactics to make the wanted result more achievable, e.g. showing a well-known
celebrity in your video, who doesn't necessarily need to be a comedian.
My chosen marketing campaign, by instance, involves a group
of comedians that, in fact, wasn't really famous when the video was made, but
rather made their fame from it. What is special about this campaign is that it
was a total accident: the comedians just wanted to make a joke criticizing
the
treatment a food company dispensed to its consumers, exaggerating the truth a
little bit too much. This almost led them to court as the company threatened to
sue them because of the video, but had a change of heart on the last second
after taking the video with a pinch of salt when it brought them an unexpected
publicity – that eventually led to resurgence in their number of consumers – and
even signed a deal with the comedians’ group to produce two other videos (one a
replica to the first video and the other an advertisement of a collection of
dishes).
Almost two years later, Spoleto (the food company) is experiencing
a re-growth after a period when they had lots of stores closed in different
states of Brazil, which are now re-opening. As for Porta dos Fundos (Portuguese for “Backdoor”),
the comedians’ group, they are nowadays a major success, having lots of videos
in YouTube watched by millions of people throughout Brazil, and are even planning
to launch a TV show called – guess what – “Viral”.
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