Did S. Murray Gaylord really mean to liken president-elect Barack Obama to a purple cow? Gaylord, VP of marketing and customer insights at NYTimes.com, did more or less just that when extolling the value of Obama’s victory to Gaylord’s firm’s flagship Web site.
Gaylord cited Internet marketing guru Seth Godin’s theory of purple cows when talking about building buzz for NYTimes.com. A purple cow, according to Godin, is a new take on something so familiar that prospects go out of their way to share it with family and friends.
The off-color heifer worked overtime this fall: According to Gaylord, NYTimes.com generated 20 million unique views in October – a 51% jump over October 2007’s level – spurred in large measure by the faltering economy and the presidential campaign.
And it opened up an opportunity for The Gray Lady – as the Times is known – to further its goals for its online activities. According to Gaylord, the paper has sought to transform NYTimes.com from an online newspaper to “a fully interactive news and information platform.”
The Times capitalized on the increased attention the 2008 presidential campaign generated among Web surfers by buying a “homepage takeover” on social networking site Facebook. For one day, every Facebook user who logged onto the site was greeted with an invitation to become a fan of the New York Times, which has its own page on Facebook.
The Times offered Facebook users the opportunity to view a video looking ahead to Obama’s first days in office, and to opine on what Obama’s top priorities as president should be. The 34,000 comments users contributed will be tabulated and sent to the White House at some point close around Jan. 20, inauguration day.
The Times further offered them a gift; a postage stamp-sized icon of the front page of the newspaper with a headline announcing Obama’s victory. In addition to featuring the icon on their own pages, fans of the Times were able to send it to other friends on Facebook.
When it first launched the program, the Times hoped that 150,000 of the virtual gifts would be distributed. Facebook users ended up posting 400,000 of them. And it anticipated serving up the video 14 million times: It was viewed on nearly 33 million occasions.
And the paper blew the doors off its “be a fan of us” goals. Before the campaign, it hoped to have 100,000 at the end of 2008. As a result of the Obama push, it jumped from 49,000 to 164,000 within 24 hours, and today stands at 185,000.
By driving traffic to its online channel, the Times has been able to observe readers’ habits and push relevant copy to them. It has expanded its reader base: The Facebook audience it has attracted is younger than the typical newspaper reader. And by tailoring what it serves up based on their online reading habits, it has been able to deepen their engagement with NYTimes.com – and expand the inventory of potential page views it can offer advertisers.
Gaylord left his audience with four key thoughts about the metamorphosis in media consumption: Consumers, not publishers, are in control; social/participatory media is a key component of winning marketing campaigns; big ideas need to be integrated flawlessly across channels to remain powerful; and a bred-in-the-bones culture of analytics is necessary to support, justify and monetize these campaigns.
Gaylord presented his ideas during a keynote presentation at the National Center for Database Marketing conference in Orlando. The conference ended Wednesday.
