Best Use of Viral Marketing in a Promotion Campaign
Killed Ideas (by Blurb)
Agency: Isobar/Ammo Marketing
Client: Blurb
Blurb.com, an online platform for self-published books, was successfully reaching personal users, but wanted to reach a broader set of business users – specifically, advertising and marketing agency professionals.
Isobar/Ammo Marketing was challenged with positioning Blurb’s service as an indispensable professional tool. Agency creative’s are driven by a passion for the newest, best, most unique answer to a client’s challenges, although many of their ideas are “killed” in the course of the creative process.
Isobar/Ammo Marketing came up with the idea to bring those killed ideas back to life and celebrate creativity as a way of engaging with agency professionals. The campaign asked creative professionals to submit ideas that, whether for reasons of boss, budget or timeline, had not previously seen the light of day.
The best of those Killed Ideas were collected in a curated book, published on the Blurb platform and distributed to creative people and agency professionals in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and London. Those who opted in for Killed Ideas communication received newsletter updates.
Steve Hall, a leading pundit in the agency world who publishes the Adrants blog, acted as curator, and selected his favorite 50 ideas. The campaign was frequently covered on AdRants. Hall also maintained a Killed Ideas blog at the microsite, killedideas.com. Bob Isherwood, former global head of creative for Saatchi & Saatchi, wrote the foreword for Vol. 1.
Contest entry submissions were collected on the microsite. Once the final 50 ideas had been selected, visitors were able to review them and vote for the Killed Ideas ‘People’s Choice’ award.
Social media was a key component of the campaign, including Twitter, a Facebook fan page, a LinkedIn group and postings to relevant online discussion boards. Strategic outreach was made to more than 300 marketing, advertising and design blogs, with influencers being tapped prior to the campaign’s launch.
A total of 250 Killed Ideas submissions were received from 31 countries, representing 170 different brands. Total campaign impressions reached 834,000. The killedideas.com microsite had more than 35,800 unique visits and 78,000 page views, and more than 11% of killedideas.com visitors clicked on to blurb.com representing a qualified pool of potential new B2B users for the brand.
Volume 2 of Killed Ideas — focused on a different angle into the conversation with agency professionals — is already in the planning stage.
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