Six Internet companies have banded together in an effort to raise their profiles and have created their own Super Bowl ads, which they have uploaded to YouTube. Lacking the kind of budget it would take to air an ad during the game the half dozen decided to take a gamble and attempt to create a viral video campaign.
The companies include Meez an avatar design firm, Meebo an instant messaging company, blog search engine Technorati, social network Multiply, address book site Plaxo and widget company RockYou. Their ads can be viewed at SuperDotComAdsXLI.
“Hiring a well-known actor or athlete isn’t the best use of our marketing dollar,” said Michael Gersh, vice president of sales and marketing at personal media-sharing site, Multiply. “Rather than a true celebrity, we elected instead to rely on someone who just thinks he’s a celebrity – Walter, our lead quality assurance engineer.”
So far the YouTube channel has had over 32,000 views. The ad done by Meebo has had the most individual views with 2,459. The ad from Technorati while amusing could run into a copyright issue as they use a clip from the film The Big Lebowski. They better hope Jackie Treehorn does not find out.
The main reason these companies decided to create their ads and use YouTube is the fact that it is very inexpensive. “All told, I think we spent less than thirty bucks on our ad,” said Jia Shen, founder and CEO, RockYou.com. “Those little videotapes are really, really expensive. It was like four dollars for a three pack. Of course, twenty five of the thirty went to sandwiches and crackers for the team.”
It will be interesting to see how well their ads do and if this will become a future trend for smaller companies.
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Mike is a staff writer for murdok. Visit murdok for the latest ebusiness news.
