SUBSCRIBERS RULE!

Cheap Advertising that beats Super Bowl Commercials

YouTube’s Ad Blitz allowed Tubers to vote on their favorite Super Bowl ads. This “Free Doritos” commercial took top place in the voting, it also happens to be the most watched 2009 Super Bowl commercial on hulu.com. The most interesting thing is that the commercial was not produced by an agency, it was the winner of Doritos’ consumer-generated ad contest. According to AdAge, the commercial only cost $2,000 to make, but Doritos will be shelling out $1 million to brothers Joe and Dave Herbert (who BTW happen to be from ExactTarget’s home state of Indiana).

At $3 millon for a 30 second spot to reach 98 million consumers, I calculate this to be about $40 CPM for ad impressions. Truthfully, they have continued to get milage out of the ad on the internet, so we can bring that down a bit… call it $30 CPM.

Looking at the cost of impressions on YouTube, this “ad” for Charlotte radio station 96.1 The BEAT takes the cake for cheap advertising. The cost, a leotard, a webcam, and a little dignity (okay, a lot of dignity–but this is a radio station intern, what did he expect?). I’ll go with the conservative estimate and throw the $150 webcam into the equation. Add $50 for the outfit and you come to less than $0.09 per 1,000 views.

Let this serve as encouragement as we think about how to grab the attention of our audiences on a mass scale. Clearly, the people at The BEAT know their audience. In this emerging landscape, anyone can give big brand marketers a run for their money!

The Super Bowl’s Email Afterthought

If you were one of the 90+ million Americans who watched the Super Bowl this past weekend, you were not only treated to a great game but also a number of great commercials from Doritos.  What you might not have known is that two of those commercials were produced by regular Joes and selected as the winner and runner-up of Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl contest.

The contest, which ran for weeks prior to the Super Bowl, allowed people to vote on their favorite consumer-generated Doritos commercials until only five remained.  The finalists were then subjected to a final round of consumer voting, and the winning commercial, “Free Doritos!“, was shown during the 1st quarter (personal aside — the runner up, “ATM“, was created by a friend of mine, but that back story is best told over drinks at this week’s Online Marketing Summit).

The campaign generated a ton of buzz for Doritos, and both ads garnered positive comments from many Super Bowl ad reviewers.

So imagine my surprise as a Crash the Super Bowl voter when I received the following email from Doritos yesterday (Tuesday).

An opportunity missed of Super Bowl proportions.

What a missed opportunity!  The email didn’t contain any branding, any offer or any call to action to become a subscriber to Doritos future email communications.  My guess is that email was an afterthought in this campaign — a line item that had to be checked off before the books could be closed on this year’s “Crash the Super Bowl” party.

And what a shame that is.  Doritos had my post-Super Bowl attention.  They could have sent me a coupon to try a new flavor or opt-in to their continuing communications.  That way, the 30 seconds of attention they garnered around the Big Game would create value throughout the year as they grew their email subscriber base exponentially overnight.

Doritos certainly isn’t alone in treating ad campaign emails as an afterthought.  One hopes, however, that the belt-tightening of 2009 will force agencies and companies to capitalize on the power of email — and subscribers — to produce far greater ROI than any single television commercial.