Grieben vs The Purple Cow

Generally speaking, it takes a lot to shock me...well not in a horror movie sense, I’ll break down like a toddler at a scary movie, but i mean in an every day sense. Very little surprises me in my everyday life.

A recent example would be a campaign run by VLG, a firm out of Houston that runs under the username @wefightboredom on twitter. this campaign representing a fictional hotel was itself an experiential case study advertising their services. Their campaign wasn't anything technically over complicated, it was just well executed and a perfect example of Seth Godin’s legendary purple cow.

What they sent me pictured here, was a non de-script brown envelope containing what appeared to be a hotel room card key and a bar napkin with (what appeared to be) a hand written personalized url, or PURL. Once visited, there was a simple but effective interactive flash page guiding you through a virtual hotel and menu selection.

The whole exchange was really nothing special in its outcome, little more than an opt in form and simple food and beverage survey. What it did do was go about collecting the data in a unique way.

The mailer itself was obvious and mysterious. It told me very plainly that a hotel wanted to get a hold of me. I had never heard of the hotel so i knew it was promotional kit, but it gave no hint to what promotion was, just a CTA asking that i visit their personalized website just for me. They had peaked my curiosity with a bar napkin. Maybe I’m a bit of a nerd but that in and of itself got me excited.

Once on the site i knew almost instantly that this wasn't a real hotel chain, I haven't had a long career yet, I have only had 4 business trips that involved hotel stays and yet I still receive at least 3 promotional mailers from various hotel chains each week. This mailer wreaked of batch and blast, but with a sophistication that surpassed anything I had seen in any communications from a run of the mill hotel chain.

After completing the self guided survey I learned that VLG was trying to promote their services and within 10 mins of completing the survey I had received a call from a representative making following up. Being as junior as I am at the moment the call was for not, but this entire interaction had two outcomes that I think should mark it as a success.

First, they blew my mind, only two other campaigns ive interacted with have had the same affect. First was Marketo’s “You Dont Know Jack” trivia game self assesment. This campaign was borrowed an existing trivia brand repurposed to collect qualification criteria. It was brilliant because well it was fun and i was more than willing to fork over valuable information that most marketers have to beg and plead for.

The second was Eloqua’s Drake campaign, gets an unfair advantage because I’m a user but i think has some real value. This campaign did a number of things it created controversy by starting by flatly denouncing a a commonly held belief that brand avatars are pointless endeavors and the company put its money where its mouth was by making numerous challenging statements to that fact. This peaked my interest as a marketer, i wanted to see how the experiment would turn out. It engaged me and held my interest and created a way for me to interact with their brand in a way that wasn't always possible beforehand. It also second was that it created a way for them to maintain relationships with users that was normally only possible on a 1-1 basis with live employees. while relationships with real employees is a very valuable thing, its value that is list as turnover moves that headcount elsewhere. the Drake campaign created the opportunity for an ever-present relationship, a conversation with an avatar that would never leave the company.

Wow that started a tangent there, So to get back on track, like these two campaigns, the VLG campaign had blown my mind and forever impressed me, but secondly and possibly more importantly it got me talking. While these other two campaigns engaged me as an individual even to the point of passing along through social media, this campaign had me up and walking the office, passing around my tangible evidence, telling the story of my interaction and basically drooling on my office floor trying to share my experience with any other marketer i could find. Short of asking for a promotion so i could fill out a purchase order their simple activity of setting up a landing page and mailing me a napkin had derailed me and gotten me to interrupt as many people as i could find.

I know this post has been a bit of a love fest but in a world tripping over itself to provide analysis of ROI and revenue attribution sometimes the art of marketing gets lost and these examples from VLG, Marketo and Eloqua are proof that while on the backend the science is important, giving me something awe inspiring will not only the person in your database and unbelievably positive brand experience, it will broaden your audience in in a way limited only by the number of people within earshot.