By Michelle Bruch
Colle+McVoy wins Webby Award for Yearbook Yourself website
On June 8, staff from Colle+McVoy are ditching their desks at the Wyman building and heading to New York for an award ceremony that’s dubbed the Oscars of the Internet.
They’re already preparing their acceptance speech — especially because the speech needs to be five words or less — for the website Yearbook Yourself. The site allows people to give themselves an online makeover with hair and clothing styles from another decade, and it became a viral marketing phenomenon last summer. Half a million people voted it the winner of the Webby People’s Voice Award.
Last year’s Webby Award winners included the New York Times in the News category (according to the Times, their five-word acceptance speech was “Please help us monetize this,”) and Stephen Colbert for Webby Person of the Year (his speech was “Me. Me. Me. Me. Me.”)
As Colle+McVoy celebrates its first Webby, staff said online marketing is giving them an edge in a difficult economy. Colle+McVoy President and CEO Christine Fruechte said many clients are interested in testing online advertising, especially because they can easily track results through web hits.
Colle+McVoy created YearbookYourself.com as a back-to-school promotion for Taubman, a Michigan-based company that operates malls throughout the U.S. The site netted more than 15 million hits from around the world, and people spent an average of 10 minutes on the site — an eternity in the web world. The CEO of Twitter posted the site on his Facebook page.
The campaign exceeded Taubman’s sales goals, and on average, customers visited 1.2 more stores than they had before. The website isn’t active anymore, but 800,000 people have already signed up for updates on the new version of Yearbook Yourself, which is scheduled to go live again later this summer.
Colle+McVoy has taken on a few other viral marketing projects in recent years. The company created paintitgold.com for Atmosphere’s new hip-hop record. Visitors could call up any website and paint it with graffiti while they listened to new tracks.
The company also created an online game for Powerball that challenged people to quickly find the differences between nearly identical photos. The game pointed out that whether the Powerball is $20 million or $200 million, the winner still takes home a huge pot of money.
Fruechte said her employees don’t set out to brainstorm viral marketing campaigns, however.
“There is no magic recipe for doing that,” she said.
Instead, staff focus on coming up with a “big idea.” In order to do that, they tack up all of their marketing ideas in the middle of the office.
“It’s usually just a note scribbled on paper on the wall,” said Mike Caguin, executive creative director.
Sub par ideas are physically ripped down and dropped on the floor, until eventually, the floor is covered in paper and the “big idea” is all that remains.
The big idea for a recent Erbert and Gerbert’s ad campaign earned Colle+McVoy an Effie award.
Erbert and Gerbert’s commissioned them to commemorate the sub shop’s 20th anniversary, which was a bit of a challenge because retailers promote corporate anniversaries to the public all the time.
“Our job is to make them care,” Caguin said.
They decided to make a cannon that would shoot out massive puffs of air to blow out candles on a birthday cake nearly 200 feet away. Staff assembled the cannon in a warehouse in St. Paul, and then shot a YouTube video of the cannon extinguishing candles from increasingly large distances. The site ended up getting close to
1 million hits.
Colle+McVoy is headed to the Webby Awards at a time when their industry is getting a little beat up. According to TNS Media Intelligence, a national market research company, total U.S. advertising expenditures in the fourth quarter of 2008 were 9.2 percent lower than the same period in 2007.
Fruechte said that some marketing clients are hunkering down, but others are seizing the opportunity to get out their messages in a time of relative quiet.
Colle+McVoy recently attracted new work from Yahoo! and Caribou Coffee, and the company is on a short list of finalists to win a Current TV account. Current TV asked for marketing bids via Twitter — so responses needed to be 140 characters or less — and 200 firms responded.
Colle+McVoy started heavily investing in digital talent and technology about three years ago, and that investment appears be paying off now.
TNS Media Intelligence reported that the Internet is one of few media outlets that saw increased advertising expenditures in the fourth quarter of 2008 as compared to 2007. Ad spending on the Internet increased 7 percent, while television dropped 5.1 percent, magazines dropped 13.9 percent, and newspapers dropped 16.5 percent.
“Agencies that invested in digital are better set up for success,” Fruechte said.
Reach Michelle Bruch at 436-4372 or mbruch@mnpubs.com.
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