More and more companies are using YouTube to produce online social media marketing campaigns by creating a YouTube profile specifically for the company then running viral marketing initiatives from that profile page. Dunkin' Donuts provides a great example of one such program that's generating a lot of online buzz.
The joint Dunkin' Donuts and YouTube marketing campaign is actually a contest where people are asked to submit videos of less than two minutes describing how they keep America running. Videos can be funny or serious as long as they describe how the entrant keeps America running each day.
The top 50 videos will win a year's supply of Dunkin' Donuts coffee (I'd love that, I drink Dunkin' Donuts coffee everyday!), and the top 10 videos will have a chance to appear in Dunkin' Donuts online programming. Videos are due by March 1, 2008, and once submitted, videos become the property of Dunkin' Donuts. Complete details can be found on the Dunkin' Donuts YouTube profile page.
I think this is a great viral marketing campaign that effectively leverages online social media through YouTube. The interesting part is there are two promotional videos available on YouTube that hype the contest. Both videos were uploaded on January 9, 2008, and they appear to feature the same actress. At 48 seconds, the first video has gotten over 500,000 views. However, when I clicked on the link to go to that URL, a message appears saying it's a private video, and I was automatically redirected to the URL of the 30-second second video, which has gotten 20,000 views. I'm wondering if that first video link was emailed to a certain group of customers or distributed in another way to a specific group of people to track the click-through results.
What do you think about the new Dunkin' Donuts and YouTube campaign?
Weird, the video was available yesterday.
Posted by: Rachel Clarke | January 15, 2008 2:40 PM | Permalink to Comment