Cliff Jennings, the now popular Idols contestant, was exposed to blogger Bruinman to be a marketing ploy by Ogilvy. This was confirmed on Tuesday by Pierre Cloete, brand manager at M-Net.
I don’t want to discuss how I feel the campaign should have been executed or how Ogilvy doesn’t understand the concept of social media. I don’t want to discuss the impact on Idols‘ (and M-Net’) brand trust and integrity. I don’t want to rant (even though it is valid).
I want to step aside and take a look at the facts for a moment. Cliff Jennings was purely a successful viral campaign, whether the end result was positive or negative. The brand awareness online around Cliff and Idols due to this campaign has risen tremendously.
Facebook
Cliff Jennings is on Facebook. He has 1 450 friends and counting. There are countless groups on Facebook dedicated to him, some good and some bad. The number of members in those groups can be estimated to be in the thousands. One group, “Cliff(ord) Jennings: The Man. The Legend. Singer. Songwriter.” has about 2 600 members.
YouTube
Cliff has uploaded 13 videos to YouTube. They have received almost 10 000 views between them and received just more than 50 comments so far.
Blogs
After doing a little digging around on Afrigator, Amatomu and Technorati, there are roughly between 13 and 28 blog posts concerning Cliff Jennings.
It’s clear to see how quickly word of Cliff Jennings has spread, although we have seen better viral campaigns. So what does this mean for Idols and M-Net? Besides all the free online publicity and brand exposure, their site traffic seems to be picking up quite a bit. Yet another successful exploit on the viral capabilities of social media.
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