Fallon Brainfood: Fallon Blog Secrets Revealed! (and the death of Fallon Planning Blog)

Its been 2 years since we launched the Fallon Planning Blog and 2 years since Ed Cotton and I did our "Blogging The Agency" presentation at AAAA Planning Conference which tried to assess the value of account planners' blogging.

At the time, questions were just starting to arise about agency bloggers and the role we should be playing on the burgeoning social web. I distinctly remember some big name planners insisting that all this bloggery and twittering was a waste of our time and we should get back our proper surveys and focus groups like a good puppy. Interestingly, not a day goes by that a client isn't asking the Insight dept for a POV on social media. Then, social media was a hobby, now its become the job.

What prompted the Fallon Planning Blog? Fallon Planners were asking a philosophical question: Are we merely our work, or are we our ideas and thinking, too? And if we're ideas and thinking, where does all that get expressed and workshopped beyond our client decks? Younger planners were asking how might they learn and hear from experienced planners beyond the annual conference? Other questions abounded about what effect social media might play on us, our industry, our work, our clients? We were beginning to see the seismic shifts that social computing was having on retail, media consumption, music, creative production, distribution, etc. A partial answer to this conundrum was to participate. We started a blog.

The blog launched with little fanfare (or even official sanction) we simply started and assumed to sort it out as we went.

So years later, what has it gotten us? What have we learned from blogging and Brainfooding and Tweeting and social networking?

Fallon Brainfood: Agency Blog Secrets Revealed!

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Highlights about Fallon Planning Blog
-Over 170,000 pageviews and over 27,406 unique visitors since launch in 2006
-Average 600 RSS subscribers a day
-Ranked #142 on AdAge Power 150 - top media and marketing blogs
-over 12,000 pageviews in Feb 2009, this year may be reaching a tipping point!
-Fallon Worldwide/Fallon Minneapolis receives an average blog mention every 11 days
-Fallon Planning receives an average blog mention every 12 hours

Highlights about Fallon Brainfood:
-over 52,000 total views of Brainfood on Slideshare plus countless live webcam views, blog posts, and Tweets
-over 4600 views of Brainfood in Q109 so far
-28,905 Twitter impressions

AAAABloggingtheAgency.pdf

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So you might wonder why all the reflective tone in this post? It probably sounds like something is ending. And well, it is...or rather, something new is soon to begin. But for now, consider the Fallon Planning Blog experiment successfully ended.

5 Ways For Brands To Use YouTube

1. In-Video Overlays

This function allows you to advertise in the middle of a video with small pop-ups. This means a coupon button could pop up right after they see the food, or a “buy this on DVD” ad pops up right after the punch line.

Monty Python Channel


Best thing is, it’s working. Monty Python has recently put some of their most popular content on YouTube and with the click-to-buy links under the video. Mashable reports that even though the content is online for free, Monty Python’s DVD sales have skyrocketed 23,000% on Amazon and reached the #2 on Bestseller list.

2. Brand Channels

These homepages can save a lot of money and be more effective. YouTube now offers enough customization you can basically create a microsite for peanuts. Also, users can stay within the YouTube environment without clicking out to get the coupons, games and other goodies.


Nature Valley’s Brand Channel



3. Annotations

Advertisers no longer need to buy banner space around their content on YouTube. They simply place it within their content for free. Annotations are also great because you can change easily without re-editing or re-uploading the video. This means brands can respond quickly to what people are saying by adding their own comments to sections of the video. Another function of these annotations has been a these choose your own adventure video (shown below). Annotations are changing the way we tell brand narratives.

Samsung Instinct


Street Fighter



4. Out of the box experiences

YouTube is willing to work with clients to make the standard video player more dynamic. Take a look at the creative approach Goodby Silverstein & Partners SF took in advertising the Nintendo Wii game Wario Land.





5.Deeper Insight
YouTube’s Insight portion helps you monitor how hot or cold your video is. It generates graphs at what time your audience is leaving or where they go back for another look. It also gives you demographics and info as to where they discovered the video. After looking at hot spots, you could better decide where to add annotations and in-video overlays. You can also understand how long your audience is willing to stick around.

What "Kittens, Inspired By Kittens" Teaches Us

The daughter of Fallon's own ECD Al Kelly has confounded much of our agency "viral" science in recent days with her unexpected and cute lil' YouTube vid entitled "Kittens, Inspired By Kittens".

In only a few days "Kittens..." has garnered over 300K views, made boingboing, Cute Overload,trended #3 top shared link last nite on Twitter, YouTube honors now incl #3 - Most Responded (Today) Pets & Animals, #13 - Most Responded (This Week) - Pets & Animals category.

Now, the reason this video is confounding to a strategist at an ad agency: it's all serendipity, folks, no budget, no client, no strategy, no objective intent - just Al Kelly sharing the infectious joy of his 6-year-old girl reading a childrens' book. That's the brief simple and plain. Either she's way smarter than us strategerists, or we're way overthinking it sometimes.


The success of "Kittens..." (and hundreds of goofy vids like it) often flies in the face of much of our well-produced, branded, and strategized factory "virals". So what gives? Is "viral" still just a roll of the dice - particularly for brands? Do we embrace the more-faster-cheaper ethos that drives the users? Do we recruit 6-year-olds to generate ideas for us? Do we get her to replicate the magic - this time for a brand? And it makes me wonder, if we had pitched "Kittens..." to a client would they ever have approved it? And if a client would've approved "Kittens..." would they have added too many brand mandatories that would slow down its "viral" appeal?

I do think we may learn 7 applicable lessons from "Kittens..." to add into our "viral video" toolbox for surefire success:
1) Embrace Silly - stupid is ok, too! (serendipity)
2) Getit?Gotit?Good. - make it a fast, easy "get": a girl reading a childrens book about kittens - got it. (science)
3) Embrace 'Good Enough' - shoot it fast and cheap, poor production value is good enough as long as they see it and hear it. (science)
4) Tap an emotional core that people want to share in spreading - people are immediately on this girl's side, we want to help her succeed at this book report. (serendipity)
5) Add Cute Kid - like Billy Dee Williams always said: "Works every time!"(science)
6) Add Cute Kittens (science)
7) Try, Try Again - rinse and repeat the above - the old broadcast method dictated we shoot one big production a year. The YouTube method says shoot more micro ideas and release them freely to the wild. (serendipity)