Novartis' Excedrin YouTube Contest Deemed A Success
Novartis Consumer Health, makers of Excedrin, launched its first YouTube contest to introduce Excedrin Express Gel to consumers.
More than 200 videos were submitted to the contest, which ran Oct. 18 through Dec. 18. The contest page received more than 147,000 views. One promotional video has been viewed 330,000 times. Participants made blog posts, videos, message forums and Facebook groups asking friends to vote for their video.
Some pharmaceutical companies appear to be paying more attention to online ads and search marketing as they look for an alternative to the high costs of television ads.
Novartis promoted the contest with online advertising, including YouTube-sponsored ads that people saw when searching for contests on YouTube.com. Automated tools in YouTube sponsored ads allowed content owners to decide where they would insert the videos, placing bids in an automated online auction and setting daily spending budgets.
"We reached out to the YouTube community and found a bunch of videos that met specific criteria, which demonstrated personal feats of speed, to seed the site and get others to organically create videos," said Eric Fehling, senior brand manager at Parsippany, N.J.-based Novartis. "As part of that, we had YouTube-sponsored videos taken from the site."
While Novartis' Excedrin Express Gel contest took over YouTube's home page the opening weekend, which quickly sent it viral, many of the people who submitted entries found the contest by searching the site.
The grand prize--$15,000, tied into the branding message "New Extra Strength Excedrin Express Gels for headache relief that starts in 15 minutes"--went to Hang Glider. The graphics on the YouTube contest page also integrated into television ads to stay consistent across several media.
The number of impressions the YouTube site served determined success. During the contest, the YouTube-branded channel was the No. 1 traffic driver to Excedrin.com. Novartis, known for advertising its Web site on packaging and some TV ads, will continue to rely on the Internet, Google and YouTube to effectively drive traffic, Fehling said.
Video searches on Google's YouTube accounted for one-quarter of all Google search queries in the U.S., making the stand-alone company the second-largest engine by searches, according to comScore's November report.
Andrew Lipsman, comScore senior analyst, notes that search on YouTube offers interesting ways to introduce new brands. "If you're trying to advertise a product, you can tell something about consumer interest," he said. "Consumers don't have to search directly for the product, but the fact that they show interest in a specific topic makes them more inclined to become the target audience."
While pharmaceutical companies have yet to jump onto YouTube with both feet, Chrysler, Honda, 1-800-Flowers, YourMoney and others have done well to dabble in the medium, creating successful new product contests and campaigns.
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Great campaign - wished I thought of it! Will work some of these tactics into the repertoire.
One thing: a little unclear as to which "content owners" were buying sponsored search ads on YouTube, tho. Hmmmm....
The real story here is the kid who got 330,000 views to his video. In the video some kid beatboxes for 32 seconds — that’s it. No softcore, no bacon or cats, no ultimate bmx crash - just some kid beat boxing for 31 seconds. So how does this video — which didn’t even win the Excedrin contest — manage to rake up over 330,000 views?
After some digging I found that the kid beatboxing is none other than the world famous Skiller the human beat box. The guy is world famous for his mad skills — see this forum string from www.humanbeatbox.com. (yes, it’s a real site). Looks like he has a big following that rallied to boost up his view count.