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Brilliant Viral Marketing: Wassup Redux

This is one of the most intel­li­gent uses of branded enter­tain­ment I’ve seen in 2008. Regard­less of your polit­i­cal lean­ings, the first 1:32 of this viral movie sup­port­ing Barack Obama’s cam­paign is so enter­tain­ing, that it’s gift of (much needed) laugh­ter nearly  tran­scends the polit­i­cal brand it’s sup­port­ing. Bril­liantly con­ceived and executed–primarily because it aimed and suc­ceeded in  engag­ing and enter­tain­ing first, then deliv­ered it’s deftly com­mu­ni­cated strate­gic messages.

We’ve spo­ken about this approach before, that peo­ple think with their hearts first–that once you have them emo­tion­ally engaged, they’re in an opti­mized state for receiv­ing your sales pitch. This film is a pro­to­typ­i­cal exam­ple of that concept.

Com­ments

5 Responses to “Brilliant Viral Marketing: Wassup Redux”

  1. windo says:

    As I was watch­ing this, I was expect­ing an icy-cold Bud­weiser logo to fin­ish off the story. A part of me was excited to think that a brand like Bud would cre­ate this type of work. How­ever, I was given the ‘ol rug pull and didn’t see any signs of the Clydes­dales. Oh well. Great spot though.

  2. rjulian says:

    @windo, yeah, they lever­aged all the equity of the Bud cam­paign then exploited it for their wicked polit­i­cal pur­poses. beautiful.

  3. tommy says:

    wow talk about flash backs

  4. It’s bril­liant.

    Dark humor with an edge.

    Some­thing you can relate to and appre­ci­ate as a mar­keter, regard­less of polit­i­cal lean­ing… in fact, one could insert *any* politi­cian / mes­sage on the screen and it would work. That’s the beauty of it.

  5. rjulian says:

    Hey Grant.. My favorite shot is the first time we see the friend in the hur­ri­cane, try­ing to get buzzed into the build­ing. Strate­gi­cally, the film made its points re: the economy/jobs. health­care, and cri­sis preparedness/response with wicked effec­tive­ness, and I agree it would have served any num­ber of politi­cians excep­tion­ally well.

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