I’m not sure I know anyone who works in advertising who doesn’t love the show Mad Men. Their season 3 promotion allows you to create your Mad Men avatar! I had to jump right on this. That’s me in the bright blue in the middle.
I noticed that the cartoon versions of Don Draper and Roger Sterling (left) are looking a lot like RTC’s Matt Connor and Jeff Ross. Does that make Barry Kessel the Bertram Cooper of RTC?
Needless to say, I think this promotion is a brilliant use of social media and viral marketing. Check the Twitter avatar of half the people who work in advertising and they have changed over to Mad Men avatars in the past few days. But the question always becomes, how do you prove success on promotions like this. RTC wasn’t involved in this promotion, but here’s what I’d do. Until the show airs, you can’t determine real ROI of increased viewers. So, right now we’d be watching the leading indicators. But what are those leading indicators? Here are a few of the stats we’d be watching:
Stats as of 07/29/2009 for past 7 days:
- URL posted to Twitter 685 times
- URL posted to 112 blogs
- “Mad Men Yourself” mentioned on 84 blogs
- “Mad Men Avatar” mentioned on 65 blogs
- 315 results on Flickr for “mad men yourself”
- Posted to Delicious 224 times
One thing we learn right away is that Twitter fans are Mad Men fans. It’s an interesting piece of data for future promotions. A quick check on my Facebook friends showed more than a few have also utilized and shared their avatars! Names are obscured to protect their privacy.
Lots to learn from this promotion, and lots of fun to be had!
I’m a HUGE fan of the show. Have been since season 1. And I made two avatars. One of me, and one of my boyfriend. So funny.
The only gripe with the site is that it’s ALOT easier to make an avatar that looks like a guy. For instance, one, the nose options are the same for men and women, and are definitely more geared towards male noses. Two, the female hairstyles offer no “long” options, which made making my avatar look somewhat like me impossible.
I get the hairstyle thing. Women didn’t wear their hair down and long in that era — at least not in the office.
As someone who’s also Mad Men-ed (is that a verb?) herself, I agree with Rebecca — at first I thought there was a mistake in the Flash app because the facial features options seemed very masculine overall.
But as Carly points out, that didn’t keep me from creating — and using — the avatar. I work at a creative agency; it’s required!
Love that the avatar is “fueled by” Eight O’Clock Coffee!
I also “Mad-Men-ed” myself, even though I’m not as rabid a fan as others of the show. I like it as much for the fashion & art direction as I do for the plot.
Carly–it seems like you’re on to something with the Twitter point. What would Don Draper think???
Don Draper doesn’t believe in research, so he’d scoff at my little findings!
I’m starting to wonder if 8 o’clock is helping or hurting. Check out their Twitter page — they are replying to everyone with basically the same response. Granted I think they should get their money’s worth. Not sure why there isn’t an 8 o’clock branded coffee mug as an avatar option. Seems like a sponsorship should get you that!
[...] Online invites you to rate the MadMenYourself ad campaign, and SparkBlog loves it very, very much. And AdWeek sees MadMenYourself as part of a new trend in advertising: [...]