The Dance Pony Dance campaign
The dance pony dance advertising campaign is pretty much a perfect example of how to run a viral marketing campaign. This hugely successful campaign was the work of Wieden+Kennedy for three mobile and directed by Douglas Wilson from Blink Productions. For those of you who haven’t seen the latest 3 mobile advert, it features a Shetland Pony moon-walking to Fleetwood Mac. The idea of the campaign was for 3 to let people know that the ‘silly stuff’ we watch and share online, does in fact matter because it is what connects us together.
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3 mobile differentiate themselves by being built for ‘internetting’ providing their customers with a fast, reliable and cheap internet service. I am not writing this post on behalf of anyone other than myself so the opinions here are entirely my own. I do happen to be on the 3 network and benefit from all you can eat data (I tend to use alot of it!) for a reasonable price.
How successful is this campaign?
Three’s marketing director Thomas Mallesschitz said they have not run such a large campaign in years because their main focus has been on building its network, improving customer service and building the brand.
Seeing as this is the first large campaign from 3 in a while it seems to be going well so far. Not only has the TV commercial been an entertaining hit but the dancing pony has gone viral online taking our focus away from the various Harlem Shake clips out there. The campaign has been running for a couple of weeks and the original youtube video has already generated 5.4 million views. Three has allowed people to join in and engage by using their pony mixer app on youtube.
How has it been such a success?
The number one factor has got to be the entertaining pony dancing around the Shetland Isles making most of us laugh and want to share the clip.
If you notice at the end of the clip there is the hashtag #DancePonyDance and its there for a very good reason. Adding the hashtag into the clip ensures people use it when talking about the clip on social media channels. If the hashtag wasnt there then people could use anything such as #dancinghorse or #threehorsedance creating confusion on the topic. The one hashtag focus the conversation perfectly.
Thirdly there is the pony mixer app, allowing people to create their own pony. The mixer caters for almost all tastes enabling people to create their own dancing pony in line with their music preferences ranging from a Bollywood clip to Punk. Once the clip has been created the option to share directly to the persons facebook wall, twitter account, email or link to the video pops up. This encourages people to share the clips. Obviously the more people sharing the faster it spreads and raises awareness online.
In my opinion I think this is a great example of viral marketing and shows how using social media in a planned and well thought through way can contribute to the success of a campaign. This is not just a standard TV commercial because it allows people to get involved and encourages them to share across multiple online channels creating a Buzz!
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