I sporadically cover marketing/advertising campaigns and tutorials in my post. And when I do, I try to make some observations rather than just report on something cool. Like my analysis of the Dell Swarm campaign.

I try to keep an Asian perspective but cover International campaigns (Like Grasshopper). There is a lot of noise specially if they are in the social media domain- and that too international campaigns

And then sometimes, the post is for documentation and for general reference. Like this time- here’s an international campaign from Philip’s agency (ies) .

The “Philips Vs” campaign

Note: Just before the post, three terms I’d like to reintroduce: GermFeeding is creating ‘Spreadable’ content;  GermSeed or Enzymate is the act of spreading or intentional placement of content to make it readily spreadable. Germ refers to an ‘enzyme’ and GermFeeding is like introducing a culture (germ) to milk to make it curdle. It is a more positive and all encompassing theory as compared to the concept of “Viral”.

You have heard little about this campaign- undertaken about 2 months ago towards the end of June. The campaign piggybacks on the MicroBlogging/Twitter phenomenon and tries to exploit the frenzy surrounding the newness of this platform.

• The proposition is simple- in order to win a Philips TV, participants in this marketing contest have to Twitter a “Philips Versus _______” tweet

• Their Profile Bio on twitter sums it up: “Philips_vs_anything you can imagine in 140 characters. We challenge you to challenge us for the chance to win a Cinema 21:9 TV & worldwide fame “

• You need to follow them on Twitter and reply to them (or use the hashtag) with a description of an idea or visualize with a link to an image or video that you have created. The best suggestions were retweeted and the Jury’s favorite to be filmed and shown all over the web
• The campaign seems to be over with the last tweet seen on July 13th (but that does not matter- not promoting the contest here but the methodology)
• They had a cool site with clever creative interface and one that explained the idea creatively and clearly
• They also had GermFeed (Spreadable content) created for this campaign like this video:

Not only this, they even took it on the streets as an on ground engagement/experiential campaign and challenged people to challenge Philips using a play with one of their products. Then again, they converted it into a video and posted it online as a classic Germseeding tactic.

On the audience participation front, there were some good submissions, and two of my favorites are here:

All of these things seem like good ingredients for a buzz generating campaign. Only they did not seem to work. (As Viral Blog showcases in this  brilliant analysis)

Even though it was a twitter centered (though not limited to- because content could be created anywhere) campaign, the buzz on twitter was not rocking

And even the general buzz on the internet did not have any effect around Philips.

So what actually did go wrong here?

Any Ideas?

I know you have some opinions…

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Come on…

So what do you think went wrong?

Shalabh Pandey (@shalabhpandey)

Thumbnail: beautiful depiction of Twitter overcapacity by Mykl Roventine