Ferrari, the key to a great viral campaign.

I'm a car nut, as all my friends know. A few nights ago, two of my friends each forwarded a new commercial/video that Shell made to celebrate the 60th anniversary of working with Ferrari. My friends were too late, as I had already seen it linked on an Internet forum for Miatas. I later found it on a couple of other automotive forums. Thursday night, the lo-res YouTube version, published just a day before, had 8,000 views. By Sunday morning, it had been seen over 100,000 times.  I can only imagine how many times the high resolution version* has been seen, it's the one that was emailed to me. Whether they intended it or not, Shell has a bona fide viral campaign on it's hands.

Okay, this isn't a typical "viral" effort. In fact, I imagine filming historic F1 race cars as they blast through the city streets of Rome, New York, Sydney, Hong Kong, Rio, and Monaco may very well add up to the most expensive commercial ever produced.  Still, the commercial got me thinking about marketing.

For all the advertising money a real estate agent can spend on driving traffic to their web site, I think much of that money would be better spent on developing a web site that gets others to drive traffic for you. Maybe it's a blog, or maybe not. the key is that it needs to be something of more value than a online brochure with some listings linked. A local internet forum could be an idea, maybe comprehensive directory of business and services in a neighborhood. Let the brainstorming begin.

The popularity of this video leverages a racing fan's love of Ferrari to the benefit of Shell. Real Estate Agents can look at what's great about the markets they work in and create the same leverage.

*you may need to right-click and "save target as" to view

--Todd Carpenter, Lenderama

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