My partners, a client and I have been exchanging some emails this weekend over Zack16.com. Consistently everyone has loved the execution. It’s very compelling and represents a creative ideal of sorts to those in the communications business. However, as we’ve talked about it, its brought up some nagging thoughts in my mind.
- The site isn’t generating a lot of comments. While comments don’t necessarily indicate effectiveness, they are a common measurement of viral/online efficacy. Zack16.com is decidedly quieter than I would expect. And given that the Dove video has 4000 comments, 9000 ratings and 9MM views, one would certainly expect a video that connected with its target (as I would think the Zack film would) might illicit more than the double-digit commentary noted on the site. On YouTube the videos have done okay in terms of viewership (26K for the first episode down to about 7k for the last episode) but commentary is still low and membership to the ZackJohnson16 YouTube channel is also insignificant all said.
- I did a tertiary look across the ‘no brainer’ sites in terms of social outreach. There’s nothing I can see on MySpace. Facebook’s only reference to Zack 16 is a true grassroots effort on the behalf of a real person. And Twitter’s search return offers up the voices of more marketing professionals than actual commentary from the teen audience. True, Zack tweets, and the writing seems on point and is equally entertaining. No doubt the copywriter involved in the film is manning the Twitter account and playing the roll well. That said, I’m not sure if 1200 followers is the stuff of deep connections given the execution has been online since early Spring. From his Twitter account I learned his handle is ZackJohnson16, so I ran that through MySpace and Facebook. Still no results. (Note to agency, don’t pick too generic a name for your character… it returns too many search results on the social networks).
- Third, and perhaps most subtly, the blog is backwards. The root page of the blog is the oldest post. Episode one of the ‘film’. This is necessary in telling the multi-episode video story but its not accurate to blogging which posts newest content first. I didn’t catch this on my first few looks at the site and wonder how many other people have noticed and what feelings it evokes. It’s also worth noting the film makers added a film page to the site as a backstop, just in case the reverse-blog didn’t get the whole story seen.
What I believe is that the idea was developed from the outside-in rather than the inside-out. This is something I’ve blogged about before. The old agency model was to start with a great TV idea and then push it down through other ‘below the line’ media. It looks like Zack16 might have begun as a great TV commercial concept. It’s not unknown for an agency to come up with a great TV idea, only to find that the client doesn’t have the budget to run it on TV. So the idea is quickly retro-fitted with an ‘online viral video’ strategy. The reverse-chronology blog format is an indicator that the whole site was built to support the video. Certainly the lack of connection to what should be first-stop points of integration online (FB, MS, Twitter) seems to indicate an old-media incubation point.
My next stop will be to check out packaging in the supermarket and some young boys and girls magazines (they’re still being published, which means even if far fewer people read them, somebody is still advertising in them) to see if the story shows up offline. I’ll also be looking to see if its integrated elsewhere (into middle school bathrooms for example).
I’d really love to be proven wrong here. The film is brilliantly done and in addition to selling a product well, I do believe it could do a lot for young people in normalizing the situation both for girls and boys.
I’d love to see Zack16 as a smartly conceived digital outreach program with all the details thought out and everything stemming from consumer insights. I’m open to anyone who can lob some evidence my way that Zack16 is doing its job, making real connections, and lives beyond just its apparent status as a repurposed long-form TV commercial with a blog wrapper online.
Perhaps Zack simply hasn’t ‘gone viral’ yet?
A spin through the Alexa stats – and in full awareness that Alexa has some significant accuracy controversy surrounding it – it seems Zack’s traffic is waning not growing. Combining low on-site comments, modest Twitter followers, modest YouTube views, no presence or measurable mentions on Facebook or MySpace, Alexa’s readings and just two Technorati listings, I must admit I’m inclined to believe Zack is underperforming at this point in its lifecycle.
So why did Dove take off while Zack has (seemingly) had a harder road? Did it have to do with the message of the videos as related to their audiences? Was it in the media usage profiles of the two separate consumer groups? In my mind, Zack and Dove had a lot of similarities, and yet their performances seem very different. I wish I knew why.
Help me here Zack.
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I missed this Adage article which explains how Zack16 is an ‘experiment’ by P&G via Leo Burnett in Chicago. For many of the reasons mentioned in my prior post, I don’t think this experiment has been given much of a fighting chance.
Frankly, I’m surprised I’ve not heard more about 
