I read a really cool book, ironically called, Chasing Cool, a year or so ago and it changed my perception of advertising. The book centered around companies looking to replicate the success of something that was perceived as "cool" and do it themselves. Most of the time it failed miserably. Now I am starting to see websites look beyond Internet Marketing for additional exposure and the results are similiar in pattern.
Yesterday I finally checked the mail and opened up the new copy of Wired Magazine. This is one of two physical magazines I subscribe to and I genuinely look forward to it every month. After the mind blowing articles I always look at the advertising and what they are trying to do with it.
When I got a few pages in I was surprised to see Moby hanging out and talking music with me. It seems that the artist most of us forgot about is now doing some promo for the new and heavily debated Myspace Music. In the ad, pictured below, Moby lets us know what is in his New York Playlist and that we can find it at myspace.com/moby.
I like the fact that is appears as if Moby hand wrote the note and picked bands and songs that he actually listens to. But is it enough to get me to sign into Myspace and either
- go listen to Moby's Playlist,
- browse through more artists and user generated playlists than I know what to do with or
- wait for 20 pages to load to create my own abbreviated playlist?
Having something offline to promote something online has always been a hard sale. The reason is simple, there are extra steps involved. If you are reading the magazine at the beach or at the doctor's office, you need to wait until you are in front of a computer and head over to the site. Even couch potatoes have to open their MacBook and surf their way into your network.
Another aspect is that anyone that is an active user on Myspace is probable aware of the New
Myspace Music. It has dominated the homepage and the user backend pages since it launched a few weeks back.
Will the print campaign convert new users?I don't think so. Do you?
Will it bring back old users who fled to Facebook?Again, I don't think so. iLike applications work plenty well inside of Facebook and having Pandora, iMeem or Last.FM open in a 2nd tab has never been a problem before.
Did Moby play to the demographics of Wired Magazine?Actually, I like that move. Moby is a bit of an underground hipster, a gadgetier and, well, a geek that fits right in. Was there someone more "now" that would be a better fit? Yea, probably, but won't that always be the case?
Will the campaign work?It depends on what the idea of a successful campaign is. I believe that Myspace has done a great job of spreading the word on the service and what you can do with it. The reason for the awareness is that the more people that use the service the more money Myspace makes, duh, no brainer there.
We need to also remember that the record labels also have a stake in Myspace Music and want it to succeed. You cannot deny the power that 100 million users have, and how that can translate into not only music sales, but also
tickets, merch and streaming of these playlists.
If the idea of the campaign is to convert new users or bring back those that jump ship, I believe that this will be an ill fated attempt. The reason is simple; if you are looking for new, groundbreaking bands, then you already know to go to Myspace. If you are also looking to spend a few hours waiting for music players to load, sort through 5 million+ bands in an unsearch friendly environment and get error messages and CAPTCHA's everytime you want to tell a band they are awesome, then you already know to go to Myspace.
I love how they are branching out.
AdRants states that this is the first time Myspace is advertising outside of their own walls. My opinion would be to make those walls more attractable by getting the worker bees to make the site better, faster and more user friendly. While the updates have been more frequent in recent months, the overall perception and feel is that it's still a mess and the bandwidth simply cannot be handled.
The fixing of the site seemed to work for
Twitter, I even forgot the name of that whale they used as a mascot.
My question today is,
can a print campaign drive "new" users online or does it just serve as additional promotion to something users already knows exists? Let's get it going in the comments.
*Addition*My good friend from
the Daily City, sent over this picture they took from the Big Apple showing Lil Wayne aka Birdman Jr. aka Lil Weezy showing off "Beats That Stick With Me." How much does that cost Myspace out of P & D?
-Greg Rollett
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