Budget Busts a Move
Brand: Budget (Car Rental Company owned by Cendant)
Execution: Blog/Viral
Link: Click Here
Target: Blog-savvy travelers
Rating: ***
Reviewer: David
Description:
The “Up Your Budget” Campaign is a treasure hunt run from a blog that features video clues. A total of $160,000 is being put up as prize money with the money divided into four weekly prizes in four regions. Contestants must correctly find the location of the “magic sticker” from the video clues on the website and call the number on the sticker as well as videotape themselves doing so and upload the video in order to win each $10,000 prize. Awareness for this promotion is being driven entirely through viral efforts by weblogs.
What Works:
This is an interesting and important test of the real viral effects of the blogsphere for marketing purposes. Can blogging alone build a brand or bring new interest to an established brand? Budget is determined to find out. They’ve chosen some fairly heavy hitters to get them started - Steve Hall at Adrants and B.L. Ochman (the designer of the promotion) at What’sNextOnline as well as sites like Boing Boing to create buzz for the promotion. This will take the form of an advertising campaign on 74 blog sites as well as blog posts on Adrants, Boing Boing and several other key properties. [Editor’s note: The ThirdWay Advertising Blog was notified of this promotion by the creators but was not compensated in any way to cover this promotion nor does the ThirdWay blog accept compensation for editorial content.]
The game itself seems to offer a fair balance of skill and luck as well as enough prizes, variety and immediacy to keep participants interested. The theme fits well with Budget’s mission (getting people to rent cars) and rewards the frequent traveler.
This also seems like a very clean test of blog propagation (other than the questions noted below) because Budget does not include a link to this promotion on the Budget website and has not as of yet posted a press release for the promotion. So Budget will have the opportunity to see just how far the blog community can get them without any help from Budget’s existing online customer base.
What Doesn’t:
The very obvious omission in this campaign is the link back to Budget. Of course, the name “Up Your Budget!” is a clear reference, but one that most consumers would probably miss without more reinforcement. In fact this is such an obvious omission that it must be intentional, for one of two reasons. The first reason would be to keep this as a pure test without the complication of the Budget name’s effect on the promotion. The second reason might be to see how well the sponsor’s name transmits virally through the blogsphere. If the Budget name is nowhere to be seen on the website, then any post-promotion increase in unaided awareness of the “Budget” brand name might be linked to the promotion (although unless this is a hugely successful promotion they will probably want to look at the brand effects on participants rather than the general population. )
This campaign does raise some potential ethical issues. The Adrants announcement shows that there are two phases to the publicity for this campaign: “Following the blog-based approach, the contest itself will be promoted almost entirely within the blogosphere with sites like Adrants, MarketingVOX and Boing Boing breaking the story and with advertising promotion on 74 weblogs, including Buzzmachine, Metafilter, Gothamist, Jossip and Busblog, through the BlogAds blog advertising network. There will also be some minimal search engine keyword and IM buys.”
The question is how Budget has guaranteed that Adrants, MarketingVOX and Boing Boing were going to decide to ‘break the story,’ or that this promotion itself would be newsworthy. Of course it is possible that by coordination with these blogs the story was pre-sold and embargoed until a certain moment. That would be a standard PR technique and not much of a problem. The stickier issue is whether any of these sites were compensated for breaking this news - either directly or indirectly (with a promised ad spend, for instance). If you keep an eye on the comments to this post I suspect we will hear the answer from one of the organizers very soon.
This is a particularly sticky issue for the blogsphere right now as consumers, organizations and government institutions try to determine whether bloggers are journalists - entitled to the same rights and protections as print or television journalists - or merely individuals expressing opinions online. In the end it is probably less important whether an individual blogger follows the ethics code of a journalist rather than a publicist and more important that people reading blogs have a clear idea whether they’re reading journalism or some mix of journalism and PR.
Branding Bottom Line:
This promotion won’t stick to the brand but may tell us the future.
October 24th, 2005 at 9:17 pm
Hi David: There is a great deal of mis-information, assumption and mis-understanding in your post that I will address point by point.
I guess you are looking to create some controversy, and that, of course is your right. But you would do well with a little more fact checking before you publish.
* Steve Hall is in no way affiliated with this campaign.
* I am not the designer of the promotion. Up Your Budget Treasure Hunt was my concept and I am in charge of creative management for the campaign.
* The talented designer and developer of Up Your Budget is Komra Moriko of Design4Results.com.
* The only contact we had with Boing Boing before the launch was to buy advertising.
* We bought advertising on Gizmodo, Adrants, BoingBoing and 74 other blogs and added some keyword advertising to the mix as well.
* You say: “The very obvious ommission in this campaign is the link back to Budget.”
FACT: There **is** a large link to the Budget website on EVERY single page of the blog in the bottom right corner. And Budget is mentioned in the rules and in several of the posts throughout the site.
* There actually are two blogs: Up Your Budget and, within that, a Hunters’ Blog that is open to those who register for the treasure hunt.
* The rest of your argument about Budget hiding its identity is based on the same *incorrect* fact and assumption.
* Regarding the so-called “ethical issues”: they are also based on incorrect assumption.
Budget sought no “guarantee” that Adrants, MarketingVox or any other site would break the story. And they certainly didn’t pay those bloggers to write about Up Your Budget.
I showed these bloggers a sneak peak of the site before the launch. They could have loved it or hated it. They could have written about it or not written about it. That was a chance we took.
As it turns out, Adrants, MarketingVox and its sister publication MediaBuyer Planner loved Up Your Budget and said so.
Yes, we did ask them to wait to write about it until we launched. As you noted, that is entirely standard practice.
I also offered a sneak peak to Business Week’s Blogspotting, but they declined until Up Your Budget was live. And then they gave us a great review today, within hours of the launch.
It is standard practice to brief both bloggers and journalists before any major company launches anything. So where, exactly, do you see an ethics issue?
* You are entitled to your opinion that Up Your Budget Treasure Hunt won’t stick to the brand. But on day one of a month-long campaign, I think it’s a bit early for such a prediction.
October 24th, 2005 at 9:35 pm
David: I’d like to add one thing. You are a great dancer. I hope we can still dance together next time there’s a great Swing band playing and we are both out doing the Savoy lindy hop.
:>)
October 24th, 2005 at 9:40 pm
Gotta agree with BL, there’s no type of track-record for how successful a viral campaign like this will be….because this is the first of its type.
It may fall flat on its face, but given what I know of the talents of the people involved, I doubt that will happen.
October 24th, 2005 at 9:44 pm
BL - You make some excellent points. When we say ‘Designer’ we mean the person who creates the promotion, not the graphic designer and we did understand that you were the creator. Sorry for not crediting the other who were involved properly.
I am very glad to hear that you used standard journalistic practice in coordinating the media around your promotion launch and did not compensate bloggers. We will be happy to post that as a separate entry if you prefer.
We still think the brand link to Budget will not be strong, but we invite you to share results of a post-promotion survey with us - what percentage of participants and non-participants who hear about the promotion will be able to identify Budget as the sponsor unaided?
Again, I’m glad to hear that there were no ethics issues here. I hope that we didn’t assume there would be, it just seemed from Steve Hall’s writeup on Adrants that it was a fair question to ask. We’ll post a clarification if you like.
October 24th, 2005 at 10:10 pm
As I read back, a very fair question to ask, David. I think it all has to do with poor choice or wording on my part. I’ll explain.
As B.L said, Adrants had nothing to do with the creation of the campaign. We were briefed on the site prior to launch and told of some of the promotional plans. Standard practice. I think the way I translated those promotional plans into wording in the post may have been misleading. Because I knew, to some extent, who BL was talking to regarding the promotion, I mentioned MarketingVOX and Boing Boing.
As I re-read my story on the launch, I see where the confusion regarding blogger involvement may have come. When I wrote “the contest itself will be promoted almost entirely within the blogosphere with sites like Adrants, MarketingVOX and Boing Boing breaking the story,” that, likely, caused some to think there was some sort of guaranteed edit going on when, in fact, there was no such thing. All I knew was that those sites had been briefed. Admittedly, my wording is misleading and I can see how you took it the way you did.
I can assure you, I had no idea whether any site other than Adrants, me being its publisher, would write about it. I apologize for any possible confusion I may have caused.
I am open to further clarifying anything to anyone if need be.
Steve
October 24th, 2005 at 10:16 pm
Steve,
No clarification needed. I posted a retraction already. I’m sorry if I created a stir. I love Adrants and did not mean to cast doubt on your value to the industry, which is huge. I have been worried about this ‘consideration’ issue more related to political blogs recently, so that is what was coming through in my post.
David
November 4th, 2005 at 2:46 am
Wow. the real power of the blog. I found the story interesting, and the comments to follow really shed some light on how a few typed words can leave people unsure of the true meaning behind them. Really a major issue that was hashed out in a few posts, and only with a blog could it have come out like that.
Very cool.
Steve
Global Advanced Media