#pedal2themetal

Some other research that I set to do was to see how things go viral, or well at least the popular ways in which things go viral. This would really be key to the campaign and how to get it to spread easily, I know if I wanted to be a user i would want it to be as easy as possible to enter a competition so I wanted to find a campaign that we can create that has this, what I like to call Low Effort = High Participation. What does this mean? It means quite literally its super easy to enter the competition(Low Effort) and that means in return we should get a much higher level of participation(High Participation).

The thing was that I still needed some research to further this idea, to make it the best it could be, so. I set about finding some articles online. Here are two that were the most helpful.

http://socialtriggers.com/craft-contagious-content/

http://socialtriggers.com/problem-fast-loading-websites/

Though the second one has a weird title being about websites, it still holds some very good ideas that are easily transferable to our campaign ideas. It has provided some really solid things to think of when making the viral campaign.

Just like the last lot of research I did, I have written an Overview / Conclusion for them and what ideas we can take from the articles and use ourselves.

These provide a lot of good tips and things to think about, the obvious thing is to tweet and use facebook to get things spread quickly, but there is more to it.

We need to use languages or sentences that invoke emotion, stuff that will challenge, cause anxiety or surprise. These get people riled up, thinking and acting quicker. Something like if we ran a competition and then said that you only had until the 29th of October to enter by, we have immediately created anxiety. People will be thinking along the lines of “Oh shoot! I only have until the 29th to enter by. I better tweet this!” Think about it, it’s used a lot and I should imagine is quite successful. The other thing that this also ties into is, how fast everything acts and that customers are used to everything being fast. So for more effect, slow down. Waiting can be frustrating but if done properly will be very helpful you can make them wait longer but you have to feed them the details and almost pamper them, tell them everything. As an example that it could be used on think of an ATM, despite being quite quick we still stand and wait and it feels like ages. We can’t improve the speed of the ATM what do we do? we tell the customer / user what its currently doing so it could say “printing mini-statement” and something like “Just recounting your money to make sure it’s the right amount”. These small but simple things lessen our perception of time because we think that the ATM is doing something with that time. The knock-on effect is that we are providing a better service and giving feedback to the user.

With these in mind we can generate a campaign that can challenge, shock or induce other emotions to sell the product, if the product can shock or anger people, then people will talk about it. We need to do this through the campaign and it also can cross into the video ideas also.

One of the things I set to research was how to engage our target audience, thanks again to Melody she managed to find some articles explaining just that, here are the articles that I read through.

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/8796.asp

http://advertising.microsoft.com/ad-network/audience/men

Once I read through these articles I decided that the best way for it to benefit the group I would write an overview of what the articles cover. Then see how these ideas that the article discuss can be used in our ideas and concepts to make our concept that much more solid.

Here is the overview that I have written covering the ideas in the articles.

Men don’t mind watching adverts if they get to the content they wanted still, we also know that the age range we are targeting are also very active online and tech savvy, this opens up new possibilities and ideas without alienating people. We have also found out that men of this age range will also research and get friends opinions on products and items before they buy them. Meaning that if we could signify that they’re friends have participated in or brought the product then they will do the same. An idea of inviting friends as discussed is a good idea, inducing competition could be a good way of getting something viral, look at song pop, how popular is that? We also need to look at ways of advertising to them, campaigns ect, since the age range holds a lot of tech savvy users it also means an immunity to adverts down the side of websites, I, speaking from experience have naturally learned to ignore adverts down the side and i’m sure thats the same for nearly everyone that uses a computer on a regular basis. We don't need to target them, this is okay since, like mentioned earlier men don’t mind watching adverts even longish ones(15-20 seconds). This leads to possibilities of adverts before other related videos on youtube, maybe asking popular youtube channels that regularly kick out content of similar styles such as racing games.

A couple of weeks ago we were given a Project Brief  where we were placed into random groups and then we had to assign our roles and start developing this brief from an idea all the way to a concept which we would then have to present this back to our group selling the idea to them and the reasons behind our decisions.

The brief as it suggests, was quite brief. It had to sell the main features of a racing game called Pedal 2 the Metal. The thing we were producing was a concept for the live action video trailer for the game and also, an idea of how we would make the video viral to reach the target audience (age: 13-35 gender: male) as best as possible.

The first thing we would obviously have to do was simply make a note of all our ideas and then see what ideas we have come up with while adhering to the concept brief.

For a first look at all of our ideas then have a look at the mind-map that one of my group members Melody Bowles did.

We knew this wouldn't be enough so I also thought of things that we could research in order to produce better ideas that will work with already co-existing ideas and trends, this was mainly to help us produce a better overall idea.

Here are some of the things I felt we needed to research.

How to engage 13-35 year olds

Popular ways things go viral

How long people watch adverts for, mainly our target audience