I was planning a post about the colossal waste that is the "Save our Tigers" campaign, when I came across this.

Now I'm not surprised that someone else has taken it up already - there are tons of smart people out there. What I was surprised about however is how comprehensive his critique is. He's hit the nail right on it's head and I concur 100%.

So without taking up any more real estate, over to Tantanoo:

‘Save’ is perhaps the noblest of all four letter words that I’ve come across. It doesn’t have the hidden desperation that other four letter words have. ‘Save me’ sounds much better than ‘Love me’, much more earnest in its desperation.

When I first saw the ‘Save our tigers’ ad on teewhee, I rubbished it, you know, like we rubbish everything from Save Haiti to Save Hockey. That way. But having 400 friends on Facebook does have its disadvantages especially when sending invites to stupid clubs is the favourite pastime of some of them. But when some of the ‘sane’ friends also sent me invites to join ‘Stripey the club’, I was sure something was amiss.

It happens so that ‘Stripey’ is an innocent tiger cub whose mom ventures out in the forest and doesn’t return. You know, like women venture out in Goa(or Delhi or Bombay or <insert Indian city>) and don’t return. But let’s not digress. So Stripey’s mom has been killed by some poachers or so the commercial says and it then punches a figure of ‘only 1411 tigers left’ in your face. Very poetic. Figures always move people. You know, when anchors were screaming the number of Swine flu victims on news channels, people were scared shitless. Similarly this 1411 figure brings a sudden horror. Add to it a cute tiger cub and you have a win social initiative. Good job Aircel. Not.

Save the Tiger – www.saveourtigers.com , in my honest and unwanted opinion, is a very poorly executed social initiative. I am not sure if this has brought any mileage to Aircel but apart from creating some buzz, the initiative hardly does anything worthwhile. It lacks the soul and resolve that a social initiative requires. It applies armchair activism to an issue where its effect is debatable, and the extent of change that can be brought is extremely limited. Let’s do a quick post-mortem of the initiative.

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More than 67% of global Internet users arrive at web sites through Direct Domain Navigation, making domain names an awesome medium for advertisers to reach their target market. (Domain Advertising’s nailed this concept here).

Here’s a great example that demonstrates the effectiveness of direct domain name advertising, specifically advertising on parked pages (domain names that have no websites for the uninitiated). It’s well targeted, it’s a creative approach (even for direct domain navigation advertising), it’s cheap(er) (more so in this case because they’re all .co.il domains) and, while I’d like to see actual stats in terms of number of site visits, coupon redemptions, etc., it’s apparently worked well.

I was reading an interesting Case Study about How Nike Used Interactive Video to Draw Crowds at Sporting Events recently realized that it’s Perfect for so many companies – including my own.

       

Click here to download:

Augmented_Reality_An_Awesome_w.zip (773 KB)

There are recruitment campaigns and there are recruitment campaigns. And then there's the Best Job in the World campaign, which can be described best as the most effective recruitment campaign in a very long time – making for a killer case study.

In fact, I shouldn't even call it a recruitment campaign - this was a lot bigger than that. It transcended mere recruitment to cover brand building, tourism promotion, social media marketing and even reality TV - garnering tremendous exposure for Australia's Great Barrier Reef islands – nothing the ads that the tourism industry normally comes up with could ever achieve.  

I won’t even be surprised if I hear that the Australians never really needed an island caretaker and this was all an elaborate way to bringing the focus of the world’s media to the Barrier Reef islands. Money well spent I say, especially when you’re getting:

This case study is a great example of a couple of things that we’ve been talking about for a while now, viz.:

-          Marketing is consistently becoming less advertising and more PR and this is a great example of this. Ads are becoming blind spots and you need to create genuine content around something with a unique angle/concept/hook to stand out from the clutter.

-          Further, this is yet another example of how Social Media Marketing can propel campaigns to becoming viral movements. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were all perfectly suited to this campaign as the infrastructure needed to help content go viral.

Enuf said, Roll the Case Study video

(Thanks xcruz82)

It’s no surprise that this won 3 lions at Cannes this year.

It’s also interesting that there was another campaign, with a similar concept that wasn’t submitted for consideration for the awards, but achieved great results nonetheless. It was the Professional Fan Job – Case Study below:

(Thanks Daniel)

On a separate note, while the Australian Tourism Board must have surely received hundreds of great applications from several qualified candidates, here's one that I stumbled upon that I think was awesome:

And in case you're wondering who won, it's this guy: