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Doritos has been everywhere lately, all over the radio, a few other ads here and there. Basically they have been punting their Facebook page.

I eventually saw that one of my friends on FB had joined the group as well as ±1500 people.

My immediate reaction is that this is a flop of a campaign. Advertising on radio is no cheap affair but an affair it is. You face the risk of being caught out by your better half - the listeners or target market. And to me it seems as though this has happened to Doritos.

Why I think this is campaign was a flop?

Coming off the back of a great advertising campaign with their “Moment of boldness” A few years ago I can’t believe that Doritos could have done so badly with this one. That campaign was a viral campaign before there were viral campaigns. To this day I know many people who still joke about their moments of boldness.

At the time of writing this post there were 777 122 people from South Africa above the age of 18 on Facebook. That works out to about 0.2% of the users on FB, from SA actually bothered to become a fan of the brand. In my mind, that’s a bit of a flop.

Why this could be perceived to be a successful campaign

Theoretically what we could be looking at here is quality over quantity. Involvement and activity over masses of inactive users/fans.

But let’s look at this for a moment before we get ahead of ourselves. The available features on the FB page of Doritos are: Notes, Photos, Video, Wall Comments, Events and Discussion Board.

To analyse these in a bit more detail:

Wall
313 posts

Discussion Board
Topic 1: 120 posts by 95 people
Topic 2: 29 posts by 25 people

Videos
12 fan videos

Photos
44 photos
5 albums

Events
Event 1 - 6 confirmed guests, 4 wall posts
Event 2 - 28 confirmed guests, 6 wall posts

Notes
7 notes
144 comments

Looking at the above breakdowns I honestly cannot say that all the money Doritos must have spent on their mainstream ad campaigns was worth it. 44 photographs and 12 videos is really not a good response in my opinion. Especially considering that there are ±1500 people in the group and over 750 000 people in SA on FB. That means that less than 1% of the fans on the page posted a video and almost 3% of the fans posted a photograph.

I’m not sure about you, but I’ve posted, viewed and commented on hundreds of photos on FB, that should’ve been the saving grace but alas, it wasn’t.

What Doritos could have done differently

Expanded their “moment of boldness” campaign to an online network of viral campaigns. Blogs, videos, podcasts and “fake events” that could have boosted the reputation of the brand for the young and socially in touch.

I can picture the blog and videos now; South Africans all over filming their moment of boldness, recording fake jumps, dares and ironic, satirical parodies of the “bold” factor.

Doritos could have done more with their Facebook group. Updates, invites, ads, coupons, giveaways, freebies. Sometimes it just takes a bit of gritty interaction to spread the word for a fan page, not an entire radio ad campaign. Other than giveaways the Doritos fan page gave nothing to its members. No community offering. I know a lot of people who feel an affinity to Doritos, it’s their choice chip, but they were not enticed to join this group. People like Apple Students has it right on their page. They have a community, not a product.

Below the line marketing would have worked better. Get bloggers involved, send them a box of crisps and ask them to eat them, rally a party around the chips, get other bloggers in on it and spread the word slowly to all their readers via the subsequent posts.

Print would even have worked better than radio. More people will sit near a computer while reading a newspaper/magazine than will be listening to the radio, so why put it on the radio? You are probably driving in your car when you hear about the Doritos fan page, not sitting by a pc with internet access. Bad move.

I did try to contact Doritos, the admin of the group or anyone but no one responded. I gave them a few working days. I’d love to know if they consider this campaign to be successful or if they are looking in to recovering from the flop that I see?

Irrespective of the medium in which the story is being told the key is that the story needs to be good.

That is my basic premise and that is what I stand by.

In today’s market stories are able to be told in various mediums with various levels of interaction, lengths, research and dedication. This can be a wonderful movement in the right direction. However if merely taken at face value story telling can be lost and misused.

Good stories will prevail and let’s be honest if there is anything that we learned from the Carte Blanche story on Web 2.0 it’s that audiences are not stupid.

Basically what I am trying to get across is that primarily journalists are just that, journalists. This is their charge in life, their career, reputation and job. I live my career and am passionate about the maintenance of my industry, the ethics and self preservation (ofcourse).

The order of things is simple: The story, the building of the story, the medium used to promote the story and the audience the story reaches.

I think that in the media industry today the above order has been marginalised and isolated.

In other words, a journalist (whether multimedia, writer, photographer or whatever) works for a magazine for example, has an idea for a story and creates it. Then gives it to the magazine and they publish it.

The magazine’s target audience does not change week to week depending on the story so basically it’s up to us (media producers) to make that change, not so? No, not so apparently.

The other way of looking at this scenario is how the story is changed to fit the medium and target audience. In the process the story becomes twisted, warped and loses its thrust. Thus not portraying its initial and intended message effectively. Perfect example of this for me is the Carte Blanche story.

The situation there was simple and in my mind two things could have changed the outcome of the story.

Firstly: The medium for Carte Blanche is television. Therefore there isn’t much time to get in to the nitty gritty of a subject like web 2.0. Yet they still wanted to appear to be “cutting edge” so they stuck with it. Their deadlines were tight and had three days to compose a story. The justification for their failure to find more sources was that they were in Cape Town.

Considering the story is about technological developments and web 2.0 why didn’t Carte Blanche really cut some edges, get on to skype, twitter, Facebook and other mediums and do interviews in that way?

That’s what I call using the tools to make a story. The story idea was there, their market is solidified in many years of broadcasting so all that was left was to construct a story that they could put forward effectively. Using these mediums altogether would have expressed some sense of “web 2.0″ and communication developments.

Furthermore, why didn’t Carte Blanche push the story on to their website? Whatever could not have been done on TV could’ve been carried over to their website, more integration, more solutions, wider audience and effective use of the tools available to them.

Secondly: Change the name of the piece of you couldn’t get the right information to fill the story effectively. Simple.

Back to the point. The essence of what I am trying to say is that mentality needs to shift in media organisations. Most, if not all major media houses have established and consistent audiences who use various media resources to gather information. Take a story and mould it in to three of four different beasts and set it free. More exposure from a wider audience.

I have made a decision to slightly change the angle of my blog, as you can see, I am heavily embedded in the media sphere in South Africa (as many of you already know) and I believe that this is where my passion and my experience lie. So that is what I will be focusing on. The posts might be less frequent, but will hopefully be more in-depth regarding the media in SA.

Here are some points about branding online and how one can do it quickly, easily and almost for free:

1. Get a dotcom or dotcoza, such as this one (nicharalambous.com). Some others, daveduarte, mikestopforth, vincentmaher, matthewbuckland, justinhartman.

5. This is the big one, Start your own company (doesn’t matter what that company does, just start it).

I might be taking the piss, I might be serious, it depends on your outlook, these things have at some point or another helped me and others I know. However some of these points have also been the downfall for some I know. So take caution when moving through the perils of personal branding. It is a cutthroat industry filled with many people. Some who are actually better than you.

Let us be perfectly honest. Making money online in SA is difficult unless you are employed by a big media house (which in itself is tough).

Those who know me or read this blog will know that I am an entrepreneur and media practitioner and not necessarily in that order. This means that I am broke some of the time. This gets old really really fast, if you don’t know, trust me on this one.

What I am getting at is that it’s tough to make a living online, it is. I am really curious to know if there are gabillions of online entrepreneurs in SA who are making boatloads of money or at least, are making a living? Are you out there? If you are, let me know cause I wanna know how you did it.

Who am I kidding? As if anyone who made the dosh is going to splurge their secrets to me on this blog? Are you?

It’s hard to work from home. There are distractions all over and reasons not to work keep popping up. Is it wrong to watch a movie when you should be working? Is it? I think it is but sometimes I just can’t help myself.

I overcame the early mornings (I am now awake at about 7:30am every morning) and have overcome the breakfast issues (I now eat breakfast). The next hill to climb is gym.

I think the best alternative is to get offices. WiredWorks is going to need offices, soon. I think that it is important, not the most important, part of a new company, offices. The corporate identity and brand that offices offer are invaluable. In spite of being an online media company I think that real world organisations like to see some sort of professionalism in small to medium size enterprises and start up companies. Offices, in my opinion are a helpful way to create this identity.

There are others ways to achieve this of course, but I think that for me right now, I need to get out of the house.
[techtags: corporate identity, startups, branding, marketing, image]

I have been in meeting after meeting this week. People pitching me ideas, concepts, website, companies, organisations and people pitching people who know people who can possible do something for me.

If there is one thing that I cannot stand it’s when people don’t know when to stop selling. Learn this lesson quickly: Pitch me your product, tell me about what you do but then stop. Finish. End. Quit and let me think about what you are telling or selling me. Do not try to resell and rephrase and re re re re re. I got it. I’m a quick learner (or so I’ve been told).

Another thing that has irritated me beyond belief is self proclaimed experts from abroad who have learnt how to “fix” our “problems” here in SA. Do not preach to me about the airs and graces of the United States of America (said with a pseudo-American-twang). Do not go in to a meeting with a South African entrepreneur and tell him that South Africa is 20+ years behind America technologically. That is not a good way to sell me on your product or concept.

The next thing is research. In today’s day and age it is possible to gather a vast amount of information about someone from the internet. Look at this blog. I have my personal details on here, I have links to things that can help you clue together my background. Go and visit my LinkedIn profile, its all there. Then come in to a meeting knowing about who I am, what my company does and where we are planning on going. Research, research, research.

These are basics that I have seen in maybe two of the eight meetings I have had this week. How can people still be missing this stuff? It’s simple. If you haven’t thought about this before, then you are hearing it now. Think about it and you will soon realise that if you do not prepare you will not be successful. You can’t invade a country without weapons, you can’t sell yourself without research.

I have been listening with great frustration to the Pepsi radio advert campaign. I am frustrated because I actually prefer drinking Pepsi to Coke.

The adverts on the radio sound something like this:

I Love Pepsi, but what if we Pepsi together and our Pepsi doesn’t Pepsi properly then we’ll have a Pepsi and our Pepsi’s will be Pepsied. So lets not Pepsi tonight, let’s wait till the Pepsi and Pepsi when we are properly Pepsied. But the Pepsi might not be Pepsi then and our Pepsi will be Pepsied for Pepsi. What a Pepsi if our Pepsi doesn’t Pepsi like it used to Pepsi Pepsi Pepsi Pepsi Pepsi Pepsi Pepsi Pepsi.

You get the idea.

I think it so unbelievably ridiculous that this actually counts as advertising. This is subliminal advertising without the subliminal part. This campaign shamelessly lacks creativity and innovation in my opinion. It simply spews out mindless words that force you to say the word Pepsi, think the word Pepsi and talk about the stupid advert from Pepsi. There is no choice here, there is no option, there is no thought behind it there is just…Pepsi. And it disappoints me.

There will be those people responding to this post who will argue that the advert does its job because even though I hate it, I am still posting about it. True. The advert does its job, and oh so well but this is what I find problematic. As consumers we love stupid things like this, we allow marketers to make us look moronic and mindless. We (myself included) do not stand up and shun the advert, complain or boycott the product.

I am not an idiot and refuse to let marketers and brand managers at Pepsi think that I am one. I will not be drinking Pepsi, they have lost a client and I hope I am not alone on this one.

I have just completed a corporate freelancing job at a Certain Cellurar provided that I wont mention by name. I am astounded as to the consistent remarks that i received regarding the interviewees (recent graduates) impression of the company.

There two opinions were so congruent that I can’t help but think that they were coached. I am almost 100% sure that they were not coached in their responses, however the comments were remarkably close. This has led me to question the inherent corporate indoctrination that is present in major corporations around the world. If you are getting paid enough, if you consistently happy at your job then you shout praises for your employer from the rooftops. Whether the praises are the truth or not, they are true for the person shouting them.

I have also completed an interview with another major corporation in South Africa that deals with electricity in some way or another. The human resources manager is incredibly good at what he does and honestly made me believe that this corporate was the best company in the world to work for, in spite of me conducting the interview. While back at the ranch the public profile of the company is in absolute disarray.

These scenarios are much like the movie Thank you for smoking, which i loved. Can you justify selling cigarettes to a 16 year old if you are getting paid well enough?

At the end of the day it is a personal choice but one that I think I might be struggling to come to terms with.

It appears as if Camel Cigarettes have quietly done a bit of a marketing ploy. Not advertised (’cause they can’t I suppose) in the media at all, no little boards up at the Petrol Stations or anything of the sort.

I simply stumbled upon the new, new camel box below at the Petrol Station:

Now what the lovely pack above involves is an outer label that looks like a box. This is covering a Metal Box that is branded with Camel which houses the regular Camel Pack. This all cost me R23-ish. It’s a mere R4 more than simply buying the regular hard box so my question is this; Is it worth Camel’s while to make this promotional box if it is only earning them R4 extra, it’s not advertised or marketed and their customers are only moving to the metal box when they stumble upon it like I did?

Either way I like it, wont use, but think it’s a nifty little gimmick.

I will be in a sales conference for the whole of Thursday. Freelance job one has subsidised the course for me. Hopefully I will learn some interesting things regarding marketing and sales and can pass on the knowledge. Woop woop for large corporations paying freelancers to learn interesting stuff they wouldn’t normally pay for!