I love the Sun Drop commercial that came out a month ago with a passion. They took a relatively small southern soda brand and made it dynamic and accessible for its national launch. In the ad an awkward white girl booty dances her way through various scenarios with a can of delicious Sun Drop soda in her hand. The whole ad is set to Snoop Dog’s “Drop it like it’s hot”. As a companion to the campaign, viewers are asked to upload videos of themselves “dropping it like it’s hot” for a chance to be their next star. Clever.
However as awesome as this campaign is, there are some issues. If I search for the Sundrop ad on YouTube, I can only find this version.
It seems the campaign creators didn’t think to upload such a clever ad to youtube. (However they did contact the video uploader as I see the video now has links to the campaign and “fair use” disclaimer which screams corporate legal team.) A little deeper digging shows their video has been uploaded to Vimeo.com through a branded channel. Huh? And the channel also has several how to videos to explain how to use their site. Double huh? Many of the videos have a whopping 1 view!
Don’t get me wrong, I love Vimeo, but for a crowd-sourced campaign and how to videos, it seems the odd choice. There’s no seo benefits ( actually there are subtle losses) and it fails to capture the mass audience well. The site itself caters to visually beautiful and artistic films and rarely is considered as the starting point for someone to upload the same vlogs and flip cam home movies that clutter YouTube. Vimeo can also havelonger load times ( due to the high resolution content), which could be the difference between someone watching or ignoring an online video. Additionally the search capabilities in Vimeo are weaker, so if someone actually heads to vimeo to search out the video- they may not find it. For example, if I search “sundrop” I get zero brand results; results only appear for the exact profile spelling “sun drop.”
On average 2 billion videos are watched on Youtube a day versus Vimeo’s ~160 million (assuming videos viewed correlates to the number of videos uploaded). The results make sense, ~4 million views on a non-brand owned YouTube channel vs. 47,000 on the Vimeo channel. Also, I should mention that the contest landing page is pulling and auto-playing the Vimeo commercial. That means potentially everyone who has watched it on Vimeo, watched it from the landing page.
At the end of the day, the Sun Drop campaign is getting attention. That’s a good thing. However, they don’t have any idea of the details of how the video is spreading. That’s a bad thing. The lesson? If you’re a brand, choose the right video channel to reach your fans. And even if you’re not going to run a campaign through YouTube, take the 5 seconds to upload it there as well anyway. It doesn’t cost you anything and you have no excuse not to.
