As We Suspected: Watching YouTube Kills Endangered Rhinos
"The tastiest meat is under the horn."
Savvy marketers understand the key to their success has been -- and always will be -- making people feel bad.
When consumers feel bad, they buy things to make themselves feel better.
When they feel good, they go running barefoot in the rain or make watercolor paintings or some such non-capitalist nonsense.
So we have to keep people feeling bad, all the time -- and that means constantly coming up with new ways to shame and humiliate our targets. After all, there's only so many times we can watch Subway commercials of overweight people breaking their favorite hammocks.
Enter Ogilvy Cape Town with its new social media campaign for rhino preservationist nonprofit Forever Wild. As noted by Copyranter (one of my favorite ill-tempered advertising bloggers), it's a pretty clever bait and switch.
Essentially, the agency created a series of "YouTube Interventions," where they replaced pop culture videos with heavy-handed rhino moralizing. So people searching for "Facebook Dad Shoots Daughter's Laptop" only get about 6 seconds of the hilarity before the video switches over to graphic depictions of rhinos being raped, eaten, and murdered (in that order).
The pay off line is: "No time to help save rhinos? Well it looks like you've got time to watch Keyboard Cat you selfish hypocrite."
Did it make people feel bad? Check. Did it increase signatures on Forever Wild's Internet petition by 400%? Check. Did it cost basically nothing to produce since YouTube content isn't regulated by any rational form of intellectual property protection? Discount Double Check.
Bravo, Ogilvy. You saved some rhinos. And you might have even saved a few hammocks.