PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

By now all of us have seen the Geico cavemen, characters in a Martin Agency campaign launched in 2004 and originally intended to stop right there, with three spots. According to a Rob Walker piece in today’s Times Magazine, the idea was to present humor as a way to alleviate the spectacular lack of interest in car insurance: not unlike the way that gazing at the area just to the left or right of a star in a telescope seems to provide more visual payoff than staring at it directly. Now, three years later, the cavemen are on their way to a possible sitcom. This is either a surefire way to kill off any popularity the cavemen have generated, or more likely, another instance of the crossing of media, entertainment and content that characterize early 21st century advertising and branding. What interested me most about the phenomenon, though, was what spurred the client and agency to create more spots: blogging.

Blogging from hundreds and hundreds of people led to You Tube postings and more chatter and enough social media presence that Geico brought back the cavemen and added them to their current roster of marketing, a roster than includes the gecko and Little Richard commiserating with the housewife about her fender-bender. It doesn’t hurt that Geico spends $600 million a year on ads and commercial time, but consider the flame that kept the cavemen from avoiding extinction: blogging.

Blogging is one of the earliest, humblest and still most powerful forms of social media.

If you need more evidence of the power of blogging beyond the Huffington Post, look at Surge soda. A single blogger has raised the profile of this 15-year-old carbonated concoction to the level of the Coca-Cola boardroom, where an equivalent soda is now being considered. Meanwhile, expired single cans of this stuff sell on eBay for more than $30.

Wanted (and anyone can take a card here, at our agency or any other): a BtoB success built on blogging, a BtoB phenom that leaps to the headlines, saves a brand, resuscitates a flagging company, champions a technology on its way to the scrap heap. Any takers? Seems to me there’s much, much to be gained.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 15th, 2007 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Advertising, Branding, Social Media. 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.