Marketing 2.0 Innovators

The new Web 2.0 websites offer a ton of opportunity to get outside of the box with your marketing tactics. Standard banner ads, links, and any other "typical" methods are no longer your only choice. In fact, they are far more expensive and far less creative than some of the things you can do these days. By combining both the old and the new, companies are able to do some pretty neat things.

Wendy's recently created a profile on MySpace for that square hamburger character from their television commercials. This character ended up with 90,000 friends shortly after joining the MySpace community and got the eyes of thousands, if not millions of people. Wendy's was able to get this many eyes for absolutely no charge and also got coverage from bloggers and journalists for this. This is a great example of how this type of portal can be used for marketing purposes, and this is not the first time MySpace profiles have been used for marketing purposes.

MGM also jumped on the Web 2.0 caravan and created some hype about one of their movies that they are going to release. This eight minute clip of the movie "Lucky Number Slevin" made it to the YouTube homepage as one of the most popular videos of the day. If you have ever used YouTube then you know that the most popular videos of the day can be the first to grab your attention. This certainly got my attention more than any preview they stick at the beginning of a DVD and came at a far cheaper price. People gave this 4.5 out of 5 stars and MGM got eight minutes of people's attention for it. Most previews are a lot shorter than eight minutes so they are getting a lot for the money here. Did I say that this cost them nothing? The bottom line is that they leveraged an entirely new medium to get some buzz for their upcoming movie and were one of the first to do so.

These examples show how companies are beginning to get the idea behind what Web 2.0 can do for marketing. We have yet to see what other companies do with all this, but I'm sure that we will find a lot more of this type of thing going forward.

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Reader Comments (4)

Michael Rad, May 1, 2006

Many say that Web 2.0 will have a infusion of video ads which I believe will fail on the long run. Do you think video ads will ever replace contextual adversiting?

Michael Rad Web2earn.com - online moneymaking opportunities

Neil Patel, May 1, 2006

Hey Michael,

I don't think video ads will ever replace contextual ads. Video ads are harder to make, while you can create a contextual ad in seconds. A lot of people do not have the equipment and knowledge to make a video ad and I think things will stay that way for a while.

Content Strategist, December 10, 2006

Neil, I think videos are (possibly will be soon?) just as easy to make as blogs. Watch out for spamvideo! Sharing and mashups of material (like jumpcut), creation tools like spotrunner, etc. People love mixing and there is a lot of web 2.0 out there.

Neil Patel, December 10, 2006

Yea, I think spam videos are coming soon if not already here. Some of the most popular videos on YouTube are spam.