This article originally appeared in the book Targeting Students: A Marketing Guide (2005)
Students, it is often claimed, are hard to reach. Dispersed across the UK at over 600 institutions, each with their own timetable, they regularly change address and are not practically targetable through any piece of old media. They've had marketers gasping for breath for years.
It's easy to see why the new media revolution has attracted many new businesses to the student market. The arrival of the internet, email and mobile phones has brought a tantalising opportunity to make direct contact with the student community.
The fact that all UK students have free internet access, that many are early adopters of new technologies, and that communication resources are the lifeblood of the highly sociable away-from-home young adult, have all helped make the new media proposition irresistible.
79% of students use the internet, most of them every day. 100% of students have an email address. 64% own laptops, 37% have their own desktop PCs and 22% own one of each. Many are connected to the web in their student accommodation via broadband.
Tom Edge, new media manager at the National Union of Students, says: "Students are online for consistently long periods, for both work and pleasure, and are willing to be entertained while they surf.
"Email is proven to be a primary method of communication for students - especially with friends and family elsewhere in the country. Given the relationship between email and the net, effective campaigns online can find their message quickly spreading when there's user approval. So the student audience is there and waiting."
Of course businesses always had the opportunity to reach students through on-campus promotions, student media, sponsorship etc. But the costs involved have been prohibitive to many. The major attraction of new media is that it can be very economical. "It's cheap to get a good online campaign underway," says Edge, "relative to TV and radio spots. Even a full site and game build, with hosting, will come in way under the budget for a cheap localised TV spot - and a good campaign may bring millions of users to not just notice, but interact with your brand. The potential benefits are sky-high even with low cost products, so long as the creative element works."
Ah, the creative element; creative executions have delivered the successes and failures of many a student-orientated business. So how can marketers make sure online ventures work for this tricky demographic?
"Ignoring banner ads and rich media promotions, there are a lot of websites out there today vying for a surfer's attention," says Edge. "A company willing to invest in promoting their message online should thoroughly survey the competition and attempt to find a new, innovative hook for their site. When it comes to viral emails, student web users are very often experienced and jaded - another low-end Flash game won't catch their imagination unless it has a serious creative hook behind it. The idea of the game must be at least as amusing as the pleasure of the game play. People only forward emails which have amused them enough to want to spread the joy - everything else gets binned.
"So being innovative is key, even if you're just putting a sharp new spin on an old idea. Poor quality, hackneyed ideas are probably the greatest obstacles to an online promotional campaign's success - getting it built and hosted professionally is a comparatively small worry."
One of the best-known creators of effective online campaigns aimed at young people is Skive, a London-based new media agency, and Kerb, based in youth Mecca city Brighton. Both are a dab hand with 'viral' games - those that get passed around by email to friends and spread like an infection. These games are particularly effective with students - a NetValue survey in 2002 found that they account for a third of the UK's 3 million regular online games players.
Skive's clients have included Adidas, Sony Playstation and Wrigleys. MD Sean Singleton thinks their recipe for success with students is pretty simple: "We try to inject humour into our work because it's really effective online. We think that young people tend to laugh at the same things. Being a student is about going out, enjoying yourself, being a bit cynical and laughing at the world. That's the approach we have at Skive.
"The problem we have to overcome is finding that place where the brand is comfortable with the creative and the student can laugh at it. What works best with viral campaigns, for example, is the extreme stuff. But brands don't always want to be associated with that.
"That said, we would always encourage risk-taking. I don't think many campaigns are worth doing unless they involve risk."
See the case study in this chapter for a summary of how Kerb achieved viral success with their promotion of a DJ's new record, and also a case study on digital specialist agency Glue's work for Pot Noodle.
Meanwhile, equally successful at student-orientated online communication is Mike Slocombe, who runs activist website Urban75. Slocombe's not-for-profit website is his passion, but such is its success with intelligent young people, he is often offered commissions by brands eager to make use of his impressive e-communication skills. Slocombe has produced work for Virgin Radio, Xfm and Youthnet.
"I love daft, nonsense stuff on the web," he says. "I don't like to see it used by companies as some kind of expanded corporate brochure, and I think a lot of students probably feel the same.
"Good practice is always inviting the student to feed back on what they're experiencing. Bad practice is thinking you can create an environment that young people will flock into and inhabit, but creating it so it entirely suits your own needs. You can't set up a chat room, for example, and ban swearing. It won't get used."
What has to be remembered before any online communication with students is attempted is that this group are habitual new media users. "Students close down pop-ups without noticing their content," says Tom Edge. "They can detect a spam mail from a dozen clicks away and won't, generally, be generous enough to see a page through if it doesn't entertain - there are too many options out there. It is easy to get it wrong, but those who get it right may well enjoy a global spread of their message that would be hard to achieve in any other medium."
Indeed, as online head at NUS, Edge has experienced first hand what happens when businesses don't think intelligently about intelligent audiences: "nusonline had its origins in the gold rush days of internet VCs throwing money at anyone with a laptop and a Hoxton Fin haircut. The resulting site - a partnership between ITM Communications and NUS - tried to be all things to all students, reviewing films and games, covering NUS news, storing documents used by students' union officers, and selling products via paid ad spots. It was a poorly executed mish-mash."
Famously within the student movement, after three years of foisting an ill-conceived product on students, ITM ran out of money. They went into administration, leaving NUS out of pocket but with the freedom to create a site that worked for its audience. "The site went through a crucial revamp. We stripped it down and focused on NUS' core concerns: campaigning,giving advice to students and building on the NUS card's status as the primary discount card used by the student market. We changed the site's construction and cut the under-performing peripherals such as
entertainment reviews.
"We've concentrated on developing a new media strategy to serve nusonline's varied audiences, rather than treating it as a get-rich-quick side project. Having said that, we do still use the site for revenue streams, selling limited commercial solus mails as well as placing limited banner ads on the site. We also attract sponsorship for our monthly update emails to our 750,000 registered members."
Edge outlines the benefits new media has for NUS and the student movement: "It saves us money - our mailing costs have been slashed as we now tend to place documents online and use email to communicate with key members. The commercial value of our brand is difficult to assess accurately, but certainly a better site has increased our credibility within our membership, helping to preserve our status within the student market."
In the book preceding Targeting Students we predicted 2004 would be a critical year for the big websites that, like the old nusonline, continued to address themselves to the fictional 'generic' higher ed student. Since then the companies behind both StudentUK.com and VirginStudent.com have both gone bust (though the websites have continued to run in plastered-up form). The online world is a tougher, unforgiving place nowadays.
Viral game creators will have to find new formats and fresh ideas if they are to keep students entertained and copywriters are going to have to get a much better sense of student thinking if they are to avoid delete buttons getting the better of text messages and emails.
All the evidence shows: the student audience is online and waiting. The question is, who is smart enough to reach them?
Showing posts with label online. Show all posts
Showing posts with label online. Show all posts
08 December 2006
Risk-taking online: success at viral marketing
This interview with Jim McNiven of respected viral agency Kerb first appeared in the book Targeting Students: A Marketing Guide (2005).
Sex. Violence. Humour. According to the rules of online viral marketing, you need at least one of these ingredients to make your campaign work. But Kerb, a Brighton-based digital marketing agency that does a lot of work for youth and student-orientated brands, doesn't take any notice of rules.
Kerb head Jim McNiven describes how they managed to get a warning message about the power of multinational corporations to the inboxes of over half a million people...while selling a few records at the same time.
"We were approached by the DJ Adam Freeland to create a website to promote his new band’s politically-aware debut single. The record, 'We Want Your Soul' by Free*Land, rails against consumerism and apathy.
"He wanted us to create something that would get people thinking about Free*Land's message and also provide an outlet for selling the track. It was a bit of a paradox - how do you sell a product that professes to be a comment on anti-consumerism to a bunch of cynical anti-capitalists!
"We know that to make something viral you have catch people's imagination, get them excited or interested. You also need a strong incentive to encourage them to forward the site to friends. We know that people like to compare and contrast with their friends.
"We created a site which led people to believe that two corporate giants had teamed up in a bid to buy people's souls. At the time it was in the news that Monsanto was close to decoding the human gene. We came up with the possibility that someone like Monsanto, with the financial backing of someone like Haliburton, could actually seek to 'buy' your soul. So we set about creating a site where two corporates had got together with that very aim. We couldn't say directly who they were, but we listed their real time share prices on the site, which gave a strong hint.
"We wanted to make people think: ‘Is this real?’ We wanted to create a wake up call, make people think this is something that could happen in the future.
"So the idea for the site was there, but we needed the extra hook, the feature that would get people to say to their friends, hey, you've got to check out this site.
"We came up with the idea of an online quotation form, similar to those sent out today by finance companies, but with echoes of the late Eighties when lenders were worried about dangerous lifestyles. It would determine the value of a visitor's soul by asking a series of questions. Do you eat fast food? Are you a practising Christian? Have you ever stolen anything of value? That kind of thing. Each answer would have a positive or negative impact on their soul's value and the visitor would end up with a quotation. They could then email their value to a friend and invite them to compare. After doing this they would be told they could raise the value of their own soul for a small fee - by buying the Free*Land single. There was a link through to a site selling the track.
"We've got a mailing list of 20,000 early adopters - people who like our content and want to be the first to receive it. It's a quality list. People are on it because they like getting viral content, not because they want to win some top-up vouchers or a holiday. We seeded the site there and waited to see what happened.
"Very quickly it was picked up by some crucial sites. It was on Guardian Online, Cruel.com, Popbitch and B3ta. Then all the blogs started picking up on it. It seemed every blog had a link to We Want Your Soul.
"We typed in the phrase 'We want your soul' into Google before we started and there were no returns. Within weeks of launching the site Google was registering 1,300 separate results! A month after launching we'd had 350,000 visitors. The hosting company, which had been arranged by Free*Land's management, pulled the site at one point, which is often the death knell for a viral piece because very few users will go back to a site later if they find it's down. But we got the site to a new host 24 hours later and it bounced back even stronger. To date it's had 563,819 visitors.
"There's so much crap talked about viral marketing. Half of what you see isn't viral. Viral is something that grows exponentially - you can send it to 200 people and it gets seen by 10,000. A viral campaign to a lot marketers means creating a poor bit of content for £10,000 and then spending £100,000 on banner ads trying to push traffic to it. Whereas you could spend £50,000 on content and get the best viral piece ever.
"There's a case for saying it's damaging the industry - this flooding of poorly-conceived creative. No-one's going to feel more affinity with a brand by playing some shonky platform game - the lack of creative thought that goes into it offends me. As viral specialists we're at risk of getting tarred with the same brush as all the amateurs that have come into viral marketing recently. Three of four years ago we were desperately trying to make people realise the potential; now I sit in front of marketing people who tell me: ‘This MUST go viral!’ It's become just a buzz word, without proper understanding of the nature of viral.
"But I'm still hugely evangelical about this method of advertising. You can hit half a million people with £5000, using something that people not only see but recommended to their friends. And there is so much freedom. If you make a funny TV ad, but it's a bit risque, people will complain. Online, it's self-censoring. If someone sends me something they know me, and they know I'll like it. No-one is going to send Kerb's wanking game to their granny or their 7-year-old nephew, but if they did it wouldn't be Kerb or the brand sponsoring the piece that would get the blame, it would be the sender.
"We did something for a top drinks brand - it was meant to be a lairy, crazy breakdancing game aimed at 16 to 30s. They made us take out any slight drug reference, anything vaguely sexual. Really minor things like a tent where you could see two people's feet hanging out. They said, look, we're a family brand we can't afford to offend people. We said to them: you can be more lairy online, because it's not going to be seen by anyone who'll be offended. I think youth brands will realise they can afford to be a bit more outrageous.
"You learn in viral marketing to go for the lowest common denominator. The success of We Want Your Soul was driven by the fact people liked to see what they were worth and compare that with friends. For a while, every blog site was asking: 'How much is YOUR soul worth?' It was a bit sad that everyone wanted to value their soul; I'd been really pleased with the creative as I thought it tapped into a really interesting topic for further thought, but basically its success was driven by people wanting to say 'Hey, guess what my soul's worth!'
"I don't know that we at Kerb are anymore in touch with the kids than our peers. Our success has come because of the fact we like to push it, like to see what we can get away with. Perhaps our influences have helped - our first office had four very anarchic little companies in it - a skate firm, a sound system, a t-shirt printer and us, and we probably benefited from that environment. There were dogs running loose, graffiti on the walls - it was a complete state. Clients used to wipe the feet when they left."
Sex. Violence. Humour. According to the rules of online viral marketing, you need at least one of these ingredients to make your campaign work. But Kerb, a Brighton-based digital marketing agency that does a lot of work for youth and student-orientated brands, doesn't take any notice of rules.
Kerb head Jim McNiven describes how they managed to get a warning message about the power of multinational corporations to the inboxes of over half a million people...while selling a few records at the same time.
"We were approached by the DJ Adam Freeland to create a website to promote his new band’s politically-aware debut single. The record, 'We Want Your Soul' by Free*Land, rails against consumerism and apathy.
"He wanted us to create something that would get people thinking about Free*Land's message and also provide an outlet for selling the track. It was a bit of a paradox - how do you sell a product that professes to be a comment on anti-consumerism to a bunch of cynical anti-capitalists!
"We know that to make something viral you have catch people's imagination, get them excited or interested. You also need a strong incentive to encourage them to forward the site to friends. We know that people like to compare and contrast with their friends.
"We created a site which led people to believe that two corporate giants had teamed up in a bid to buy people's souls. At the time it was in the news that Monsanto was close to decoding the human gene. We came up with the possibility that someone like Monsanto, with the financial backing of someone like Haliburton, could actually seek to 'buy' your soul. So we set about creating a site where two corporates had got together with that very aim. We couldn't say directly who they were, but we listed their real time share prices on the site, which gave a strong hint.
"We wanted to make people think: ‘Is this real?’ We wanted to create a wake up call, make people think this is something that could happen in the future.
"So the idea for the site was there, but we needed the extra hook, the feature that would get people to say to their friends, hey, you've got to check out this site.
"We came up with the idea of an online quotation form, similar to those sent out today by finance companies, but with echoes of the late Eighties when lenders were worried about dangerous lifestyles. It would determine the value of a visitor's soul by asking a series of questions. Do you eat fast food? Are you a practising Christian? Have you ever stolen anything of value? That kind of thing. Each answer would have a positive or negative impact on their soul's value and the visitor would end up with a quotation. They could then email their value to a friend and invite them to compare. After doing this they would be told they could raise the value of their own soul for a small fee - by buying the Free*Land single. There was a link through to a site selling the track.
"We've got a mailing list of 20,000 early adopters - people who like our content and want to be the first to receive it. It's a quality list. People are on it because they like getting viral content, not because they want to win some top-up vouchers or a holiday. We seeded the site there and waited to see what happened.
"Very quickly it was picked up by some crucial sites. It was on Guardian Online, Cruel.com, Popbitch and B3ta. Then all the blogs started picking up on it. It seemed every blog had a link to We Want Your Soul.
"We typed in the phrase 'We want your soul' into Google before we started and there were no returns. Within weeks of launching the site Google was registering 1,300 separate results! A month after launching we'd had 350,000 visitors. The hosting company, which had been arranged by Free*Land's management, pulled the site at one point, which is often the death knell for a viral piece because very few users will go back to a site later if they find it's down. But we got the site to a new host 24 hours later and it bounced back even stronger. To date it's had 563,819 visitors.
"There's so much crap talked about viral marketing. Half of what you see isn't viral. Viral is something that grows exponentially - you can send it to 200 people and it gets seen by 10,000. A viral campaign to a lot marketers means creating a poor bit of content for £10,000 and then spending £100,000 on banner ads trying to push traffic to it. Whereas you could spend £50,000 on content and get the best viral piece ever.
"There's a case for saying it's damaging the industry - this flooding of poorly-conceived creative. No-one's going to feel more affinity with a brand by playing some shonky platform game - the lack of creative thought that goes into it offends me. As viral specialists we're at risk of getting tarred with the same brush as all the amateurs that have come into viral marketing recently. Three of four years ago we were desperately trying to make people realise the potential; now I sit in front of marketing people who tell me: ‘This MUST go viral!’ It's become just a buzz word, without proper understanding of the nature of viral.
"But I'm still hugely evangelical about this method of advertising. You can hit half a million people with £5000, using something that people not only see but recommended to their friends. And there is so much freedom. If you make a funny TV ad, but it's a bit risque, people will complain. Online, it's self-censoring. If someone sends me something they know me, and they know I'll like it. No-one is going to send Kerb's wanking game to their granny or their 7-year-old nephew, but if they did it wouldn't be Kerb or the brand sponsoring the piece that would get the blame, it would be the sender.
"We did something for a top drinks brand - it was meant to be a lairy, crazy breakdancing game aimed at 16 to 30s. They made us take out any slight drug reference, anything vaguely sexual. Really minor things like a tent where you could see two people's feet hanging out. They said, look, we're a family brand we can't afford to offend people. We said to them: you can be more lairy online, because it's not going to be seen by anyone who'll be offended. I think youth brands will realise they can afford to be a bit more outrageous.
"You learn in viral marketing to go for the lowest common denominator. The success of We Want Your Soul was driven by the fact people liked to see what they were worth and compare that with friends. For a while, every blog site was asking: 'How much is YOUR soul worth?' It was a bit sad that everyone wanted to value their soul; I'd been really pleased with the creative as I thought it tapped into a really interesting topic for further thought, but basically its success was driven by people wanting to say 'Hey, guess what my soul's worth!'
"I don't know that we at Kerb are anymore in touch with the kids than our peers. Our success has come because of the fact we like to push it, like to see what we can get away with. Perhaps our influences have helped - our first office had four very anarchic little companies in it - a skate firm, a sound system, a t-shirt printer and us, and we probably benefited from that environment. There were dogs running loose, graffiti on the walls - it was a complete state. Clients used to wipe the feet when they left."
Taking Pot Noodle online
Case study, as told by Jo Hagger and Seb Royce of digital agency Glue London.
This article originally appeared in the book Targeting Students: A Marketing Guide (2005).
"Our brief was to take Pot Noodle, the slag of all snacks, online. Students were considered to be a big part of the audience. There's a Pot Noodle sold every four minutes, and a lot of them are sold on campuses.
"We knew straight away that we wanted to do something other than the most obvious interpretation. The obvious approach might have been something like a sex shop mock up. We wanted to think it through further.
"The key theme at the centre of the Pot Noodle campaign is about illicit consumption. Pot Noodle takes the place of sex when you apply the illicit consumption idea. So firstly we started looking into what that means online.
"We realised quickly that it is a lot about porn, and in terms of the 18-24-year-old male audience that Pot Noodle is aimed at, porn takes up a significant proportion of their time online.
"We thought about how we could utilise that without being too crass or obvious about it, because Pot Noodle is very much tongue-in-cheek, cheeky humour, not outrageously offensive.
"We know that a lot of porn sites are organised in the form of web rings: a collection of sites that are interlinked and that you can travel round in without having to go elsewhere. We thought that idea could lend itself to the brand's site very well because it allows you to represent the different flavours, with each site having its own personality and linked to the overarching Pot Noodle brand.
"Once we came across porn web rings we realised the art direction would fit perfectly with what Pot Noodle had already done offline, because of its trashy feel. These web rings are often really poorly designed with appalling typos everywhere. We thought the amateurishness would make a great feature. We stopped trying to think about good design and concentrated on bad design.
"We had to reign ourselves back because of budgets, because the possibilities were limitless. We designed a site that navigates horizontally rather than vertically. When a site has just one entry point people don't drill down enough because they can't be bothered, but when there's not much to see on one level people tend to explore.
"Students are regular web users and have highly developed surfing habits. They like quick hits of content and don't like to dig far for it. We wanted to create something that had a broad yet shallow structure that was easy and quick to use.
"We were also careful not to push the product down their throats. There's a lot of FMCG [food, manufacturing and consumer goods] sites that are laughable - the products themselves aren't interesting and you think: why do they bother? Luckily we had a great campaign to work with, all about the attitude of Pot Noodle than the product itself. Yes, there is a section on the site where you can find out the nutritional benefits of Pot Noodle but generally the site's about having fun.
"There are certain bits you can't access without putting in your data and there are areas, like the hysterical girlfriend interactive video game, where you need broadband. These features create a sense of exclusivity.
"We experimented a lot with certain features and the great thing about this project is Unilever, the owners of Pot Noodle, just said 'do whatever'. So we did. Then when we did show them everything they did say 'but not that, or that'! But to their credit we virtually had carte blanche and that gave us enormous inspiration to be creative.
"Pot Noodle is a renegade brand, but what is and what isn't acceptable is a matter for careful consideration. Despite being hugely successful and having won awards, the Slag of Snacks campaign has fallen foul of the Advertising Standards Association on a couple of occasions which increases sensitivities. We knew that the target audience wouldn't be offended by anything we put out, but you have to bare in mind those visitors who aren't the target. At the same time, this is not a push media and people would have to pass a warning before they got in.
"When it comes to explaining the web's potential as a medium, it's not just about the technological advances, but what you can get away with. There are seriously offensive things on the web, some seriously edgy things, not necessarily selling products but very accessible. In terms of this target market's threshold, they are not easily shocked. They have been brought up on a diet of hardcore films of every genre, Jackass TV, sick stuff flying round on email. When you're not in that target group, it's difficult to see through their eyes.
"We created an anti-Pot Noodle site as part of the package. We tried to be as authentic as possible; a lot of porn web rings get hijacked by people trying to get their own messages out with pop ups, which must be massively irritating for the user but perfect for what we wanted to do. We wanted to keep people there as long as possible and if we had pop-ups with anti-Noodle sites it would add to the authenticity and the idea that Pot Noodle is something really bad that you shouldn't be doing. It definitely fitted with the message that you just can't help yourself.
"One new aspect for Pot Noodle is that we introduced them to dialogue with the consumer. There are lots of areas where you can speak and interact with the site - email the webmaster, t-shirt requests etc - and that brought something new to the brand.
"The beauty of the site is that it can be added to and developed easily, at least while Pot Noodle sticks with the illicit consumption theme. We've got loads of ideas to be rolled out as and when they're needed.
"We would say one of the main things we have found working with students is that they like to be heavily incentivised and the incentive needs to be massively relevant to them."
This article originally appeared in the book Targeting Students: A Marketing Guide (2005).
"Our brief was to take Pot Noodle, the slag of all snacks, online. Students were considered to be a big part of the audience. There's a Pot Noodle sold every four minutes, and a lot of them are sold on campuses.
"We knew straight away that we wanted to do something other than the most obvious interpretation. The obvious approach might have been something like a sex shop mock up. We wanted to think it through further.
"The key theme at the centre of the Pot Noodle campaign is about illicit consumption. Pot Noodle takes the place of sex when you apply the illicit consumption idea. So firstly we started looking into what that means online.
"We realised quickly that it is a lot about porn, and in terms of the 18-24-year-old male audience that Pot Noodle is aimed at, porn takes up a significant proportion of their time online.
"We thought about how we could utilise that without being too crass or obvious about it, because Pot Noodle is very much tongue-in-cheek, cheeky humour, not outrageously offensive.
"We know that a lot of porn sites are organised in the form of web rings: a collection of sites that are interlinked and that you can travel round in without having to go elsewhere. We thought that idea could lend itself to the brand's site very well because it allows you to represent the different flavours, with each site having its own personality and linked to the overarching Pot Noodle brand.
"Once we came across porn web rings we realised the art direction would fit perfectly with what Pot Noodle had already done offline, because of its trashy feel. These web rings are often really poorly designed with appalling typos everywhere. We thought the amateurishness would make a great feature. We stopped trying to think about good design and concentrated on bad design.
"We had to reign ourselves back because of budgets, because the possibilities were limitless. We designed a site that navigates horizontally rather than vertically. When a site has just one entry point people don't drill down enough because they can't be bothered, but when there's not much to see on one level people tend to explore.
"Students are regular web users and have highly developed surfing habits. They like quick hits of content and don't like to dig far for it. We wanted to create something that had a broad yet shallow structure that was easy and quick to use.
"We were also careful not to push the product down their throats. There's a lot of FMCG [food, manufacturing and consumer goods] sites that are laughable - the products themselves aren't interesting and you think: why do they bother? Luckily we had a great campaign to work with, all about the attitude of Pot Noodle than the product itself. Yes, there is a section on the site where you can find out the nutritional benefits of Pot Noodle but generally the site's about having fun.
"There are certain bits you can't access without putting in your data and there are areas, like the hysterical girlfriend interactive video game, where you need broadband. These features create a sense of exclusivity.
"We experimented a lot with certain features and the great thing about this project is Unilever, the owners of Pot Noodle, just said 'do whatever'. So we did. Then when we did show them everything they did say 'but not that, or that'! But to their credit we virtually had carte blanche and that gave us enormous inspiration to be creative.
"Pot Noodle is a renegade brand, but what is and what isn't acceptable is a matter for careful consideration. Despite being hugely successful and having won awards, the Slag of Snacks campaign has fallen foul of the Advertising Standards Association on a couple of occasions which increases sensitivities. We knew that the target audience wouldn't be offended by anything we put out, but you have to bare in mind those visitors who aren't the target. At the same time, this is not a push media and people would have to pass a warning before they got in.
"When it comes to explaining the web's potential as a medium, it's not just about the technological advances, but what you can get away with. There are seriously offensive things on the web, some seriously edgy things, not necessarily selling products but very accessible. In terms of this target market's threshold, they are not easily shocked. They have been brought up on a diet of hardcore films of every genre, Jackass TV, sick stuff flying round on email. When you're not in that target group, it's difficult to see through their eyes.
"We created an anti-Pot Noodle site as part of the package. We tried to be as authentic as possible; a lot of porn web rings get hijacked by people trying to get their own messages out with pop ups, which must be massively irritating for the user but perfect for what we wanted to do. We wanted to keep people there as long as possible and if we had pop-ups with anti-Noodle sites it would add to the authenticity and the idea that Pot Noodle is something really bad that you shouldn't be doing. It definitely fitted with the message that you just can't help yourself.
"One new aspect for Pot Noodle is that we introduced them to dialogue with the consumer. There are lots of areas where you can speak and interact with the site - email the webmaster, t-shirt requests etc - and that brought something new to the brand.
"The beauty of the site is that it can be added to and developed easily, at least while Pot Noodle sticks with the illicit consumption theme. We've got loads of ideas to be rolled out as and when they're needed.
"We would say one of the main things we have found working with students is that they like to be heavily incentivised and the incentive needs to be massively relevant to them."
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