This just in:
“Better ROI From YouTube Video Than Super Bowl Spot”
According to Advertising Age, “With not a penny of paid media and in less than a month, ‘Dove Evolution,’ a 75-second viral film …has reaped more than 1.7 million views on YouTube and has gotten significant play on TV talk shows ‘Ellen’ and ‘The View’ as well as on ‘Entertainment Tonight.’ It’s also brought the biggest-ever traffic spike to CampaignForRealBeauty.com, three times more than Dove’s Super Bowl ad and resulting publicity last year, according to Alexa.com.”

So, what’s going on here? As I see it, this is part of the massive changes ripping through the marketing world.

• The impact of consumer control: Those 1.7 million “exposures” happened on the consumers’ terms, not becasue they couldn’t avoid them.
• The power of relevance: The message spread ONLY because it was meaningful/interesting/entertaining, in other words, because it was relevant.
• The speed and force of word-of-mouth: The message spread person-to-person on a scale never possible before
• The declining importance of the mass media: “Not a penny spent on paid media”! How about that! Mass media lives and dies based on ad revenue. But if it’s possible to get better results without advertising, then they might be kind of screwed. We’ll see.

In case you didn’t get the memo, the rules have now officially changed. And to put a finer point on that — the old rules don’t work. And if some of them do, chances are they work differently now and for different reasons.

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