What could be better than being as cool as Kanye West?
Well, perhaps growing a working pair of Michael Phelps gills. But a summertime promotion teaming the recording star with Absolut vodka promised a pill that could do exactly that: turn anyone into Kanye West, for a few hours.
The campaign grew out of a sponsorship by the stylish Absolut 100 of West’s “Glow in the Dark” tour earlier this year. That link extended to a short video produced by West for Absolut’s “Visionaries” branding campaign, launched online in February. The video shows clips by creative and distinctive artists, comedians and personalities themed around the Absolut tag line, “In an Absolut World.”
West’s clip was a clever spoof on celebrity and narcissism. He walks into a club, takes over the dance floor, but retreats to the men’s room in sudden panic. The reason? He’s really a doughy white guy who’s able to drop a couple of fizzy tablets into a glass of water and turn back into Kanye West for a few more hours.
Funny stuff in itself, and the clip was rolled out to play in movie theaters this summer, as well as on Absolut’s Web site, an Absolut channel on YouTube and in other Internet media. As of last month, the clip has gotten more than 220,000 views on the YouTube Absolut channel and 2,200 ratings.
But Absolut and the online agency behind the “Visionaries” campaign, Great Works, found a few interesting ways to take the concept deeper into the realm of buzz marketing. TBWA\Chiat\Day, which handles Absolut’s print and broadcast advertising, created a pitch-perfect ’70s-style infomercial for “real” Be Kanye pills.
Standing before a dazzling array of cheesy backdrops, West asks viewers, “How many times have you told yourself, ‘I feel famous and powerful on the inside, but nobody sees it on the outside’?” All the infomercial clichés are strung together: the booming voiceover, the exploding-galaxy background, the say-goodbye-to-messy-gels claims. The branding on the spot is extremely subtle. Only those who know the Absolut tag line will get the reference when West says, “Any time is Kanye time … in an Absolut world.”
Great Works placed the ad on a microsite, www.BeKanyeNow.com, which has seen upwards of 50,000 page views. The spot is also running on YouTube, where it has gotten about 150,000 views.
To move the campaign offline, Great Works and TBWA created spoof ad cards that appeared on subways and buses and in taxis around New York City.
“We just wanted to find a way to get a real 360-degree impact around the Kanye West material, and this presented itself,” says Zoe Turnbull, account supervisor for Great Works.
The cards point viewers to the BeKanyeNow Web site, but they also offer the same toll-free number shown in the faux infomercial. That number, staffed by media agency OMD, offers callers a chance to input their mobile numbers to sign up to become a West groupie, sign on to his “Absolut-ly fabulous” entourage, or get recipes for Absolut summer cocktails.
The final phone option is being connected directly to West’s cell phone. Choose that, and you’ll find yourself on hold for a callback from West — in three months, 24 days, 11 hours and 24 minutes.
“It’s had one of the highest responses to a direct-response ad that OMD has ever seen,” Turnbull says.
The same could be said for the reaction from the blogosphere, which has seen hundreds of blog mentions of both the out-of-home campaign and the phony infomercial, in blogs ranging from Gawker to forums for mass transit riders.
But a viral campaign is a tightrope act. Brand too heavily, and you’re discounted as advertising; too lightly, and you wind up amusing some of your audience while confusing the rest. It remains to be seen if Absolut, Great Works and TBWA have gotten those proportions right.
An item in New York magazine asked, “Is Kanye West’s New Viral Campaign Too Viral for Its Own Good?” and reported subway riders looking at the ads in befuddlement, unsure what it was promoting beyond West the artist. Blog comments are also pretty evenly split into those in on the joke and those left out. “What? This is a joke I hope and if not, I feel sorry for the dummies that actually try this garbage,” wrote one poster about the subway campaign.
The more specific online question for marketers conducting viral campaigns is deciding whether to take the user-comment hits that come after releasing content into the wild. Comments on the Absolut YouTube channel have been fairly moderate — mainly complaints about West’s “narcissism” — but some of the comments on other YouTube member sites featuring the video, or pages on other video sites, have been pretty brutal about both the singer and the brand.
“I’ll never listen to Kanye again, and I’ll never drink another Absolut martini,” one YouTube commenter wrote.
Is this good for Absolut?
Ian Crystal, brand director for Absolut New York, says the company made a conscious decision to keep the comment unfiltered.
“Our target consumers are going to talk,” he says. “They have open minds, they exercise their free-speech rights, and as a brand, we have to be part of their conversation.
Great Works’ Turnbull agrees.
“If you’re going to commit yourself to having an online identity, we feel you have to play by the rules of the community,” she says.
For more articles on interactive marketing go to www.promomagazine.com/interactive
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