Sunday, November 7, 2010

T-mobile's Viral Marketing Success

I'm not a T-Mobile user but I frequently find myself impressed with their marketing ability.  All State insurance has been been supplying us with some entertaining and quite humorous commercials with their Mayhem campaign, and Geico has been dazzling us for years.

Despite their marketing successes, T-Mobile has been able to dwarf them with their Life's for Sharing viral marketing campaign.

Take a  moment and see for yourself.



If you are unfamiliar with the concept of a flash mob, simply take a lesson from the phrase flash flood.  An area gets flooded from a quick burst of water, and can disappear as quickly as it came.  A flash mob usually begins in a very public place, many times serious and fast paced.  I've seen Flash mobs in Grand Central Station, and even Times Square for example.

Suddenly music begins and one person starts singing and dancing. They are quickly joined by other and that number quickly multiply's until virtually everyone in the area is singing and dancing.  They looked in the beginning to be unassuming and very boxed into their own little worlds when suddenly, they are all participating in something you'd expect to see on Grease or Hairspray, but never in real life.

In this video T-Mobile has arranged a series of songs from different composers in the theme of traveling and being away.  A singing woman approaches a young couple who look like they've been apart for some time.  At one point the girl looks as if she asks her bo if he arranged the event which it appears he denies it. LOL  Then a gentleman takes over accompanied by a vocal orchestral (no instruments were harmed in the making of this video) This gets taken over by the "return of the Mack" tune by Mark Morrison.  Suddenly another man claiming to be "The Traveler" takes over and demands that the crowd Sing It.  Suddenly half the terminal breaks out into song and vocal instrumentation.  This continues until every person is involved whether they were intending to or not.  All of this shenanigans ends on a song welcoming all of the travelers home.  Emotional, and captivating this video has had over 2.2 Million views since it was uploaded a little over a week ago!

T-Moblie has been successful in this area of Viral Marketing.  When I mention Successful I'm merely explaining they get views on Youtube and other Viral media sites.  Whether this form of marketing has lead to the conversion of customers I don't know.  I was moved to feeling a sense of humanity and (don't tell ANYONE) I even got teary-eyed near the end. LOL  I was impressed that the unity of everyone involved sent such a positive message.  You can find people who were so moved during the time of the recording, they posted videos taken from their cell phones.  It's a wonderful thing to be able to reach people at a level such as this, and is one of the reasons it became so popular so quickly.

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