‘Digitorial’ yields news dividend for creative communications

We’ve all heard of ‘straight-to-video’. These days, rarely but increasing in frequency, there’s ‘viral-to-news’, where the take-up by the public of a short video on You Tube persuades the media to make it a story.

The media grants it newsworthiness on the basis of the viral’s (a) wildfire-like popularity, (b) its original or compelling content, or both.

This week here at SKV we’ve demonstrated a 24 carat example of the success of a new hybrid of the viral video strain.

We’ve dubbed it ‘digitorial’ – and it shows that viral is coming of age as a medium which the traditional media such as the BBC, and therefore the public, understand.

The BBC loved our viral for visitBlackpool tourist board so much that they embedded it as part of this morning’s Breakfast TV schedules (and right throughout the day), sparking ITN, Sky and Channel 5 into action, too. As I write, print media are following up.

Unlike previous campaigns we have run before, such as the AHD168 animation, they didn’t have to wait to hear that ‘the kids’ or some other audience were forwarding it to their own network – they just thought it was fun, witty and suprising, compelling visual content which they thought made a good story.

On the morning of the Beeb’s exclusive, it has proved to be less of an infectious viral and more of a straight injection into the bloodstream of the nation.

Agreed, the Cadbury’s gorilla and eyebrows virals were also beautifully worked into mainstream media as stories, but in those cases they made news not only because the content was intriguing or humorous, but because it was such a different approach for a mega-bucks advertising campaign.

Yes, Blackpool is a wholly different consumer product to chocolate.

But clients may be forgiven for asking themselves: when the public’s attention can be grabbed by a clever and creative little film made for relatively little, where is the marketing mileage in the major cost allocations for TV and cinema ads?

I’m not suggesting that virals like Je t’aime Blackpool will begin to replace the way big brands are marketed to mass audiences. And there’s plenty yet to do here at SKV to exploit the rocket fuel of BBC coverage to blast off into the furthest reaches of the digital universe with some ‘classic’ viral seeding…

Yes, today’s blanket TV coverage for visitBlackpool means creativity – a cool idea, a great script, some lovingly crafted images – can make news: hail the rise of digitorial.

Tags: bbc news, Blackpool, creative communications, destination marketing, Manchester public relations, PR, pr manchester, public relations, tourism, tourism pr, viral films, virals

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Andrew Spinoza, SKV Conversations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.