December 3
4 Online Brand Gimmicks that Failed
By now, marketers know that brands cannot fully control their own message anymore. Consumers now have a diverse set of channels through which they can interact with their digital world, and they’ve taken rightful ownership of their own destiny when interacting with brands through those channels.
In an effort to be heard and to increase engagement, brands are turning to new, innovative ways to approach the digital marketing landscape, from social environments such as Twitter and Facebook, to blogger outreach and global alternate reality games. Like anything else new and innovative, the risk of failure in these approaches runs high, and the payoff is unknown.
But failure, if done early and often, can be more instructive than success. Let’s look at four new and innovative ways that brands attempted to engage with their consumers through digital, and see what lessons we can learn.
Lesson 1. Tell a story, but make it your story
In February 2008, 50 bloggers and gamers received mysterious packages in the mail containing clues to an online alternate reality game (ARG) with a clear call to action: Find “The Lost Ring.” These packages kicked off a six-month effort across the globe by more than 150,000 players in seven languages to uncover a lost Olympic game. The game officially ended at the Beijing Olympics, and it generated more than its share of accolades in marketing circles.
But that’s only half of the story. The game is a classic example of what’s known as “dark marketing” — a viral campaign in which the sponsoring brand (in this case, McDonald’s) is barely, if ever, acknowledged. The theory is that mentioning the brand would turn potential gameplayers off when they realize that they’re simply playing a part in a larger marketing campaign. In this case, it wasn’t revealed that McDonald’s was participating until months after the game began.
