With reference to my last post, sometimes the old-boy ways are not the best ways, and social media is the bear trap that many ‘traditional’,  ‘general’ or ‘full service’ marketing agencies lose their legs in.

I’ve been following this little story with interest. In a nutshell, ‘traditional’ advertising agency has a go at social media, gets it a little bit wrong, fumbles the recovery and ends up getting it very wrong. The agency in question is Saachi & Saachi, the client is Toyota (like they needed any more bad publicity) and the project was a simple (but terribly over-done) competition to come up with a home made advert for the Toyota Yaris.

I could try to paraphrase the entire scenario here but I found this article my Mumbrella in Australia which explains in painful detail how this came to be, the resulting fall-out and more importantly, the learnings. I found myself reading it through my fingers at one point.

As Tim Burrowes tactfully summarises;

“It’s now obvious that PR expertise is not an optional extra that ad agencies having a bit of a dabble in social media can do without. Although advertising has always had the potential to be controversial, for social media that possibility grows exponentially and that risk needs to be controlled.”

If you haven’t seen the ‘winning entry’, I suggest you read the article before watching the clip below, the lead-up makes it even more remarkable.

Just noticed that our Mr. Men Pinball game has just re-appeared in the “Hot Games” top 6 on the Miniclip homepage. Considering this game has been around for about 2 years now, that’s fantastic! Not sure of the figures as they’re probably also a little guarded, but I’d expect it to be somewhere up near 40 million game plays by now. Amazing when you consider the population of the UK is about 65 million

That’s the power of a good advergame. Equate that to a traditional media spend on say, Yahoo or the Google Ad Network and the ‘cost per click’ or ‘cost per engavement’ is very impressive on Miniclip or similar gaming sites. People actually spent more time playing the Mr. Men game then the length of an TV episode of the Mr. Men Show! Click through to the Mr. Men Show site was similarly impressive. Double figures where the usual industry average for a click through on a banner is maybe 1.4%.

Obviously, advergames are one of my pet passions and I’ve made a few games before so this is kinda big news yet a big ‘I always told you so!’ moment. I’ll post something more useful in the near future but fo now, enjoy the pinball!

Note the little square bottom right. That’s cool.