The Long Tail (29 page)

Most television is already free and advertising-supported. Yet the networks still want to find ways to charge for it online, even though the production costs are paid for by broadcast, and online distribution costs are low. Why not give it away online as well, bookending (rather than interrupting) it with ads or just finding a bigger audience for the product placement, which can be neither stripped out nor fast-forwarded past? Ultimately, in abundant markets with loads of competition, prices tend to follow costs. And thanks to the power of digital economics, costs just get lower.

In the early
spring of 2006 a team of planners at the Campbell-Ewald advertising agency in the Detroit suburb of Warren watched Burger King’s ridiculous (and ridiculously successful) “Subservient Chicken” interactive Web ad and pondered how they might do something as cool as that for cars. Not just any car, but Chevy’s workhorse Tahoe SUV, which had lifted the fortunes of the carmaker’s parent company, GM, for nearly a decade but was now running headlong into $3-per-gallon gas.

Campbell-Ewald had run Chevy’s advertising ever since Mr. Campbell and Mr. Ewald met Louis Chevrolet in 1914, and the firm was both keen to show that it was not stuck in the past and mindful of the legacy that it must live up to. But the one thing that was clear was that this time the usual solution—another overproduced TV car ad—would not do. For one thing, TV ads just aren’t working the way they used to. McKinsey, the consultancy, projects that by 2010 advertising on broadcast television will be barely one-third as effective as it was in 1990, thanks to rising costs, falling viewership, ever-proliferating ad clutter, and viewers’ TiVo-fueled power to zip through commercials. And then there were the small matters of the Iraq War, climate change, and a wave of green consciousness sweeping the country, all
of which made selling a huge rolling display of oil consumerism an even trickier proposition than usual.

The Campbell-Ewald team was hoping that the answer for the Tahoe lay on the Web. Not just because an online marketing campaign could be interactive, and thus potentially more engaging than a passive TV ad, but also because it could reach consumers who weren’t paying attention to TV ads at all anymore. The days when network television was a good proxy for all of America itself are gone. The sought-after demographic of males between eighteen and thirty-four is increasingly online, playing video games, or otherwise turning away from the broadcast schedule. Females of the same age are just a step behind them. And the more money you have, the more likely you are to be time-shifting your watching with a digital video recorder like TiVo or a cable set-top box—and probably skipping the commercial interruptions.

Campbell-Ewald’s thinking went something like this: Chevy’s tagline is “An American Revolution.” So let’s do something, well, revolutionary. Basic interactive Web ads—steer the car with your mouse!—aren’t enough. Let’s take this thing up a notch—let’s have an online contest to see who can create the best TV ad for the new Tahoe. Chevy will supply the video clips and music—mostly standard fare of Tahoes sweeping along trafficless vistas, parking at the edge of spectacular cliffs, and otherwise delivering their drivers to landscapes of rugged beauty and presumably bumpy access. Users could then mix and match the material and add their own captions. The wikification of the thirty-second spot—what could be more revolutionary than that?

Starting in March, the contest ran for four weeks. In spots that aired during a special episode of
The Apprentice
on TV, viewers were urged to go to a newly built microsite, Chevyapprentice.com, and create ads of their own using the video and simple editing tools posted there. The contest drew more than 30,000 entries, the vast majority of which faithfully touted the vehicle’s many selling points—its fully retractable seats, its power-lift gates, its relative—emphasis on “relative”—fuel economy. But then there were the rogue entries, the ones that subverted the Tahoe message with references to global warming, social irresponsibility, war in Iraq, and the psychosexual connotations of extremely large cars. Annoyingly, they were some of the most clever
ones, too. “Like summer? Get used to it.” “Peak Oil is here. Maybe you should walk.” And, of course, “What would Jesus drive?” On its own Web site, the Tahoe now stood accused of everything from terminal squareness to crimes against humanity.

What’s worse, the most subversive and funniest of these were now circulating on YouTube, where they were racking up hundreds of thousands of views—more than those on Chevy’s own site. Campbell-Ewald had gotten just want they wanted—a viral hit like the Subservient Chicken—but for all the wrong reasons. An online mob had co-opted the campaign and turned it against the product. And a network TV–sized audience was now gleefully dancing around the bonfire of a great American brand.

It didn’t take long for bloggers and reporters to realize that something weird was going on over at Chevyapprentice.com. At first, everyone assumed it was just another case of a big corporation not “getting it” about the Internet. Then, when the ads weren’t yanked down immediately, they figured Chevy was too clueless even to notice what was happening on its own site. Only gradually did it dawn on people that Chevy had no intention of removing the attack ads.

In fact, the Campbell-Ewald team had assumed all along that they’d get some negative responses, and they decided they’d lose all credibility if they pulled any of them down. Ed Peper, Chevy’s general manager, pointed out in a post on GM’s FastLane blog that the Tahoe can run on ethanol and gets better gas mileage than other large SUVs, but as far as Chevy was concerned, that was that.

Within the advertising industry, consultants gleefully watched the riot and reassured their clients that this proved that you can’t turn over your brand to the great unwashed. But by any objective measure, the Tahoe Apprentice campaign has to be judged a success. The microsite attracted 629,000 visitors by the time the contest winner, Michael Thrams, from nearby Ann Arbor, was announced at the end of April. On average, those visitors spent more than nine minutes on the site, and nearly two-thirds of them went on to visit Chevy.com; for three weeks running, Chevyapprentice.com funneled more people to the Chevy site than either Google or Yahoo did. Once there, many requested info or left a cookie trail to dealers’ sites.

Sales took off, too, even though it was spring and SUV purchases generally peak in late fall. In the first nine months after its introduction in January 2006, the new Tahoe accounted for more than a quarter of all full-sized SUVs sold, outpacing its nearest competitor, the Ford Expedition, two to one. In March, the month the campaign began, its market share hit nearly 30 percent. By April, according to auto-information service Edmonds, the average Tahoe was selling in only forty-six days—quite a change from the year before, when models languished on dealers’ lots for close to four months. Even the hooting among marketing pros died down after Scott Donaton, the editor of
Advertising Age
, asked in a column for a show of hands from all those who thought the campaign proved the dangers of user-created content. “Ah, yes,” he wrote, “there’s quite a few arms raised—you’re all free to go, actually; the marketing business doesn’t need your services anymore. We have a toy railroad set as your lovely parting gift.”

Donaton was taking aim at a central tenet of “golden age” mass-media marketing: that by controlling the ad message, Madison Avenue can somehow control perception of the product. “When you do a consumer-generated campaign, you’re going to have some negative reaction,” said Ed Dilworth, a Campbell-Ewald executive. “But what’s the option—to stay closed? That’s not the future. And besides, do you think the consumer wasn’t talking about the Tahoe before?” They were, of course; the difference is that in the YouTube era, the illusion of control is no longer sustainable. “You can either stay in the bunker, or you can jump out there and try to participate,” he says. “And to not participate is criminal.”

Why did the Tahoe ad work, despite having been hacked by haters? Well, for starters, the notion that SUVs are not a great way to save the environment was not news to their potential buyers. Indeed, it’s not impossible that the fact that huge vehicles drive crunchy green types mad may be part of the attraction for some of the Tahoe’s red-state base. And then there is the factor that Chevy, by starting the contest in the first place and then not taking the negative spots down, actually looked pretty cool. And for a stodgy American car brand, that is close to pulling off the impossible.

But as the Tahoe example demonstrates, all this comes at a price. Users, not marketers, dictate the dialogue online, and never more so
than when they’re invited to contribute their own thoughts. The search for engagement and interactivity online invariably leads to loss of control. For custodians of brands, who have spent most of their careers polishing their messages, the idea that the message is no longer theirs to create and own is somewhere between heretical and terrifying.

There’s no stopping it, however. More and more, consumers are doing this stuff on their own. YouTube is full of unsolicited Chevy “ads” that are far more sophisticated than anything the Tahoe Apprentice campaign yielded, pro or con. There’s “Chevy Lowrider Commercial,” which shows vintage Chevys hopping down the street, and “Chevy Ridin’,” a slide show of custom Chevys set to the gangsta rap hit “Chevy Ridin’ High.” There’s even “Chevy Tahoe Memorial,” an elegant video that shows a young man jumping, drifting, and ultimately wrecking his much-loved SUV.

Consumer-generated advertising has led to some seriously upside-down behavior. Brands that once yelled at us now ask what we have to say. No longer content to define our identity (GapKids, the Marlboro man), they ask us to help define theirs. But none of this is stranger than the idea that you can sell a product by sitting back and letting people put their own spin on it. Everybody says they want to hear from consumers. Well, be careful what you ask for: Now they won’t shut up.

This is the rise of the Long Tail consumer. Along with the fragmentation of markets is coming the fragmentation of marketing. One-size-fits-all ads on broadcast media no longer influence consumers who aren’t watching that media or responding to messages that aren’t really aimed at them. In the inversion of power that has accompanied the rise of the user-driven Web—individuals trusted more, institutions trusted less—the most effective messaging comes from peers. Nothing beats word of mouth, and as we’ve seen, the Web is the greatest word-of-mouth amplifier the world has ever seen.

The problem with fragmented markets and one-size-fits-
one
consumers is that there are, well, a lot of them. No company can create enough targeted messages to suit every potential niche where there might be demand for what they sell. And the best way to do something even close to that, Google’s targeted placement of text ads next to rel
evant content, is limited to text and stigmatized by being displayed under the “sponsored links” header.

Instead, the best way to market to Long Tail consumers is to find out who is influencing them and focus your energies there. That starts with doing less messaging and more
listening
.

Fortunately, the tools for listening have never been better. Along with being the best word-of-mouth medium ever, the Web is also the most measurable one. There are dozens of free tools online that can tell you what people are saying about your brand and which of those people have the most influence. These include:

• Technorati filters (or Google Alerts): You can set these up to tell you anytime any blog or other site online links to a URL you specify or uses a term you define. Delivered by either email or an RSS feed (an information stream that you can subscribe to and read in any feed reader such as Bloglines or even your My Yahoo page), these can be overwhelming if you don’t pick your terms carefully. But they are the closest thing to taking the pulse of the online world possible, if you can make time to keep up with them (or make that part of somebody’s job).
  
• Google Trends: This allows you to see how often a phrase or product is being searched for, and compare it both over time and against other terms. Not only that, but it also shows which cities and geographic areas are searching most often for the term. For kicks, try some big brand by comparing “[brand] sucks” vs. “[brand] rocks.” If you happen to work for that big brand, brace yourself first.
  
• Social networks: One of the powerful things about sites such as MySpace and Facebook is that you can search them for brand or product mentions and then analyze the context: who’s talking about the product, what they are saying, and whom they influence. It’s not in the slightest bit scientific, but it can help in creating sample profiles of potential “alpha consumers” who can create buzz or set trends.
  

One of the stunts I do when I visit companies is to quiz them on what the average consumer will find if he or she does what average
consumers do—start with a Google search on any company they want to learn more about. You’d be surprised how many companies don’t know the answer. They don’t Google themselves. The point is not just where their own site shows up on the search, but also what else shows up on the same page, sometimes higher.

In many cases one of the top results is the Wikipedia entry on the company. That entry is written by regular people who have taken an interest in the company, and they tend to be both its biggest fans and its worst enemies. Rather than the two canceling out into a neutral (but hopefully accurate) view of the company, the Wikipedia convention is that room is made for criticism, usually in a section devoted to controversies surrounding the company. All companies have some controversies, and to their critics nothing is too trivial to include. Usually some balance is struck by which criticism is not allowed to dominate the entry, but the interesting thing to me is how few companies are even following the editing of their own entry.

It’s a trivial matter to create a feed of all changes to a Wikipedia entry and designate someone to watch that. What to do when something really unfair appears is another matter—it’s bad form for companies to edit their own entries, and because it’s an easy thing to compare the IP address of the people who make changes with the blocks of IP addresses assigned to companies, the cases of companies getting publicly exposed for whitewashing their own entries are rising. Work-arounds include sneaky things like editing from home or public Internet connections (technically effective but morally corrupt) or appeals on the parallel discussion board for each entry to have independent contributors correct errors or biased passages.