An article of mine from today’s Sunday Business Post:
With conventional production costs and advertising rates rising, a campaign by ad agency Chemistry showcasing a fake development plan for Dublin Port has highlighted the power of viral advertising. This is the term used for advertising that relies on consumers passing the ad to each other online.
The Dublin Coastal Development video, which runs for two and a half minutes and has been hitting mailboxes, blogs, newspapers and the airwaves since last week, was created on the relatively modest budget of €15,000, but has garnered considerable attention for the product behind it, new Irish property site Funda.ie.
‘‘It’s gotten a pretty amazing reaction, we’re pretty overwhelmed by it,†said Funda Ireland chief executive Ronan Higgins.
‘‘The phones started ringing even before we realised [the video] had gone public.
‘‘There was an ad in the Metro with the site-planning notice and literally within an hour of that someone had rang up about it to the Joe Duffy show.â€
The video, available at Dublincoastaldevelopment.com or on popular video site YouTube.com, showcased a fictional multinational corporation’s plans to create a shamrock-shaped island off the coast of Dublin in a similar fashion to the spectacular Palm Islands in Dubai.
The video shows the island’s planned business and residential area, as well as the world’s first giraffe-only zoo.
At night, a series of lights on its coast would make the shamrock visible from space.
To date, more than 30,000 people have watched the video on YouTube alone. As well as producing a video and website for the hoax project, the company erected temporary fake planning application signs in various locations. A further €12,000 was put into online advertising and what Higgins called ‘‘buzz marketing’’; where individuals went onto internet chatrooms and forums and tried to create a discussion about the product.
This kind of marketing is also known as astro-turfing, as it is a manufactured version of grassroots marketing and, due to its covert nature, has proven to be controversial with online communities. Despite the fanciful nature of the video, not everyone got the joke.
‘‘You wouldn’t believe how many e-mails I’ve gotten from people who are dead serious and who want to invest in this; it’s bizarre,†said Higgins.
‘‘A good proportion of people took it entirely seriously; they started getting riled up about it.
‘‘People started calling their local TDs and writing to the paper. . .my gut instinct is that it played in our favour. You always get noticed when it’s controversial.â€
Funda, which is a subsidiary of a Dutch company by the same name, has entered into a partnership with the Irish Auctioneers & Valuers Association (IAVI), and has taken over the group’s website, www.realestate.ie, as part of a ten-year deal that will offer access to the vast majority of property sales in Ireland.Â