yeah, Google's gonna love this
November 5, 2012 11:52 PM   Subscribe

BUYRAL (2:30 promotional video) is a new service that makes brands go viral, by the sale of bulk clicking on videos. Just another straight-faced tongue-in-cheek idea from Totonto's john st. advertising, who were previously seen on MeFi with Catvertising (and, yes, they have made some cat ads).
posted by oneswellfoop (6 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
In the future the homeless will be paid to click on ads in shelters to promote the products no one can afford to buy.
posted by The Whelk at 12:06 AM on November 6, 2012 [2 favorites]


It'd be brilliant satire IF it weren't a real ad agency doing it...
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:13 AM on November 6, 2012


oneswellfoop: "It'd be brilliant satire IF it weren't a real ad agency doing it..."

Not at all. In order to effectively create satire, you need to be incredibly in tune with your audience. It's arguably one of the most difficult genres to write for -- even if you miss the mark just slightly, you come across as smug, out-of-touch, contrived, or outright insane.

Both of John St's videos hit the mark almost perfectly. They acknowledge that the web is an odd, quirky place, and that there are portions of their own industry that are completely nuts (and frequently fail to actually deliver meaningful value for their clients).

Counting clicks for online advertising should have died in the 1990s. The raw number of clicks that you get is a meaningless metric*. Today, advertisers focus more on getting clicks from precisely-targeted audiences that are considered more likely to buy their products. This tactic can even justify campaigns that have an absurdly high cost-per-click (sometimes over $1/click), because precise targeting can produce very high conversion rates to generate a good ROI from these high costs.

Granted, precision-targeting has its pitfalls -- you're not going to attract new audiences, although I'm told by people in the industry that traditional advertising doesn't really do this either. Targeting a broad audience with a single ad is apparently hard as hell, and there are only a few (very expensive) agencies that do it well.

*Kind of like how Sonic's ads are seen by the entire country, despite the fact that the brand does not have a nationwide presence. This apparently still makes sense for Sonic, given the economics of national TV ad buys, but they also shouldn't be paying too much attention to the raw number of people that see their ads. They only care about the people who actually live in the markets that they serve.
posted by schmod at 7:01 AM on November 6, 2012


Ho ho.

If only it were that complicated.
posted by DanCall at 9:06 AM on November 6, 2012


I lost it at the knuckle crack. Keep clicking!
posted by Xoebe at 9:18 AM on November 6, 2012


The cl-ap on your unit lol
posted by stbalbach at 9:58 AM on November 6, 2012 [1 favorite]


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