Last week I wrote about the Heinz create-a-commercial contest.
I talked about how a good, fun contest is a great way to get people to watch your commercials for free. It doesn’t matter if the consumer-created commercials are good or bad. It’s about all those people who sit there watching them for fun. (Yes, people will watch your commercials for fun.)
I had no idea how big it was.
The videos created for the contest had 5.2 million views. That’s amazing.
In traditional advertising terms, let’s say that the project cost $50,000 (which I doubt). That means they got TV advertising for less than a $10 CPM.
But these aren’t regular TV spots that we ignore. These are YouTube videos that we choose to watch. It’s intentional, we’re engaged, and we watch a bunch of them. Seriously high-quality marketing.
If you can do it for ketchup, you can do it for anything.