Issue: Disney Investment in Hulu brings ABC programming
Commentary by: David Vinjamuri

Today Walt Disney is reported to be taking an equity stake in Hulu under a deal that will bring ABC content like Lost and Desperate Housewives to Hulu.  In just over 24 months, Hulu has gone from being yet another silly startup funded by old media giants NBC (GE) and Fox (Newscorp) to the dominant long-form video destination on the web with ad revenue expected to surpass Youtube in 2009.

The formula to success however, has nothing to do with Web 2.0 wizardry.  Quite the opposite.  This advertising blog believes that Hulu is great because it’s brought the simplicity of the 1950′s to online video.  The magic formula has two parts:

1. Put everything in one place
2. Don’t overwhelm programming with advertising

Hulu defied corporate tradition by linking to content they did not carry.   If a prime-time television show could be found anywhere on the Internet, watching it was as simple as going to Hulu and searching, whether that landed you on Hulu or a media web site.  This probably seemed foolish to competitors at the time.  Why send customers away?  But it turned Hulu into the Google for long-form video content – the best, most relevant place to search and find television shows and movies.

The second part to Hulu’s success was dictated by the online environment, which is notoriously unfriendly to interruptive video advertising.  Consider two ways of watching an episode of FOX’s hit drama ‘House’.  Turn on FOX on a Monday night and you’ll get the full episode of House – 42 minutes – served up with 18 minutes of advertising.  On Hulu, watch the same episode with just five commercial breaks of thirty seconds each.

What’s not immediately obvious is that the second strategy works better – even before Hulu starts targeting the ads it shows based on your user profile.  Why?  Because you’re much more likely to watch a :30 second ad than a three-minute advertising pod.  In fact with DVR penetration increasing to record levels, it is becoming clearer that fewer and fewer television viewers are watching advertising at all.

Hulu is a great success, but the point here is that part of their magic formula is simple: they aren’t greedy.  If television networks hadn’t progressively crammed more and more commercials down viewer’s throats, we’d probably still be watching there, too.  Ask FRINGE …

Brand: Fiesta (Ford)
Execution: Web, Twitter, Facebook, Experiential Marketing
Target: Urban Drivers
Rating: *****
Reviewer: David Vinjamuri

Description:
To launch the 2011 Ford Fiesta, a new version of the subcompact car, Ford is using a year-long experiential marketing campaign called Fiesta Movement.  Ford interviewed over 1,000 hopefuls to award 100 of them keys to their own new Ford Fiesta for six months.  They will complete “missions” which will involve using the cars in different ways and “lifestream” the results over social media.  In parallel and during the week of the New York Auto Show’s opening, Ford invited key Twitters and Bloggers to test-drive a 2009 Euro-spec Ford Fiesta, which will is the car that the U.S. 2011 model will be based on.

What Works:
Ford hired Crayon social media guru Scott Monty to run its social marketing programs and he has put together a clever offering for the Fiesta.  Ford realized that a significant portion of subcompact sales (particularly of hot models like the Honda Fit and Nissan Versa) are clustered in five key cities around the U.S.  This made a social networking strategy viable for the brand launch of the new Fiesta. The Fiesta occupies a key market niche for Ford, one which has been long dominated by Japanese brands and is led by the Honda Fit.  The 2011 Fiesta will bring a Euro-sensibility to the small car niche as the design will be brought over from the model currently on sale in Europe.  Ford is following a classic influencer model on one end, with activities like blogger/twitterer test drives conducted around the time of major Auto Shows.  At the same time, the Fiesta Movement offers both the chance for word-of-mouth marketing and consumer generated advertising similar to the Nissan Sentra launch where blogger Adam Horowitz was challenged to live out of the car for a week.

The targeting and the social networking make this launch a good test case for both twitter and expanded social marketing programs in the car arena.

What Doesn’t:
A movement that starts a full year before the product launches is a huge commitment, so Ford will have to keep its eyes on the road to avoid crashing this one.

Branding Bottom Line:
Ford thought it was all a great idea until it put this blogger behind the wheel.