Over the last month, I have written several posts about Dove and their most recent viral video venture on YouTube. If you are not familiar with it, they hired an actress and offered users a chance to (in their minds) create a Dove commercial that would be played during the academy awards. Though they supplied all the content that could be used for these videos and they also banned all men from participating in this contest. This campaign received a great deal of attention and hits from the YouTube community, but if you look a little bit deeper, you will see that the campaign was no where close to a success.

YouTube vlogger Shmuel Tennenhaus sent me a link to a video post of his where he discusses this campaign and I think he raises a number of great points. Please view the video below.

Excellent thoughts Shmuel, thanks for sharing!

Though I do believe there are some other points that need to be looked at here regarding this campaign. First and foremost, this video should of never been put up on YouTube, period. The video is an absolute straight advertisement and anything that is blatantly advertising will most likely get panned by the YouTube community.

Even more importantly than that, at the heart of viral videos is the engagement factor. What makes viral videos successful is that they are contagious. Viewers want to send them to their friends and others want to take them and make them their own either by commenting via message boards, blogs or vlogs. Dove did not allow for any of these things and it cost them dearly. How do you create a contest where you supply all the content, images, videos, music, etc. and expect to get anything original? And then be surprised when you are called out on this.

Bottom line is that Dove – Unilever and their agency Ogilvy wanted their cake and to eat it too. They wanted to capture attention using user generated content, but were unwilling to give up control of their brand to see if they could be successful.

Technorati Tags: Dove, YouTube, Shmuel Tennenhaus, viral videos, engagement

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