• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, December 15, 2004

By now you've probably seen or heard about the most recent Crispin Porter + Bogusky viral site for Method Soap. Just in case you haven't, the site can be found here.

Once again Crispin does a great job of engaging the user in the experience of a brand, but I wanted to take a moment to point out what is missing from this effort. Not a criticism, but the extension of an idea.

This effort is engaging and it is very ingenious from a purely creative perspective but is missing some key elements from the perspective of an online marketing effort. Online marketing is about allowing the consumer to gain easier access to information that might be of value to them. It is about decreasing the distance between a consumer and a brand. This site relies on virality to spread the message, but does not do a good job of promoting itself.

Of key importance, go to Google and type in "method soap come clean." There are no results for the brand and no results for the site. Do the same exercise and type in "method soap come clean marketing advertising viral," and still nothing. If you visit the site you'll notice that it does not take advantage of its meta-tags to be properly spidered by the search engines. What this means is that for a person who may have heard about the site and wants to check it out has to try really hard to find it.

I tried multiple times to find it when I first heard about it and had to rely on an e-mail from a colleague to check it out, which I guess is the point. That being said, I am a marketer and if I had trouble finding the site, what about the intended target audience? I'm sure the intended target is broader than "San Francisco-based online marketing execs."

From what I'm told, another issue with this execution will be that the site is purely Flash-based, and while Flash is a fantastic tool, the spiders for most search engines cannot accurately track and record dynamically created content via a Flash site.

This means that the meta-tags are even that much more important. The only other way that the site will start to show up in search results is if it becomes the destination of many links from other sites. As a short-term marketing execution I am not sure that there is much reason to link to the site beyond initial PR to promote the site.

For a campaign to truly take advantage of the Web as a marketing vehicle, it needs to utilize the many elements at its disposal. Ingenious creative is absolutely the starting point and one of the most important, but it's not enough to live by the strategy: "if you build it, they will come." Many a creative idea has wallowed in infamy in the deep recesses of the Web.

To truly be effective at driving results you must promote it correctly. Why not re-work the meta-tags to better drive casual traffic to the site? Why not launch an affiliate program and start the "Come Clean Network" and follow the lead of a cult-like organization that prays to the gods of soap? Why not leverage mobile marketing and text message your confessions to the site, or build a mobile version of the site that can drive confessions in the real world? These are ways that the site can reach a larger audience and become more of a phenomenon.

Please know that I am a fan of creative. I wanted to take this moment to add to an idea that is in the public eye so that we can all learn to embrace multiple aspects of the industry and build even more effective campaigns. Call it 'co-opetition' or what you will. The addition of ideas can never be seen as invaluable.

What do you think?