Insurance comparison website Compare The Market are currently running a TV ad in the UK, which in addition to being an amusing and memorable advert in itself, it’s also doing a very positive job of building brand awareness online via social media to CompareTheMeerkat.com.
This is a great example of how brands can combine their offline and online marketing to create a popular brand and have a direct influence towards increasing online traffic and sales.
So let’s take a look at the social media impact this is currently having around the web:
YouTube
8,251 Views and a 5 star rating, the video has also been added under several different profiles so the actual number of views is higher:
Facebook
The world’s new most famous meerkat already has 5,860 fans on Facebook:
Twitter
No-one wants to miss out on the branding and networking opportunities offered by Twitter these days, not even meerkats! Here’s Aleksandr Orlov’s own Twitter profile, it’s obviously a light-hearted and fun account but this also adds a more personal touch to the brand and helps to provide an additional level of customer support online:
Social Media Bookmarking
CompareTheMeerkat.com is becoming very popular online and undoubtedly people will bookmark their favourite links on Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon etc…
Inbound Links & Blogging Buzz
It’s early days but the new domain is already starting to create a buzz and generate some powerful inbound links, I’d expect this to improve considerably over the next couple of weeks too:
Increase in Web Traffic
Plus the website has become so popular even Alexa can’t fail to notice!
So there you have it, that’s how an excellent TV ad can be made to maximise brand awareness online. It’s also a refreshing change from the brands who create a new domain/website but fail to mention it in offline advertising without promoting effectively online either. Maybe it’s time to start integrating your direct marketing campaigns with a social media marketing strategy!
I immediatly thought this was clever hybrid marketing. Must have come up with this while brainstorming the tagline ‘compare the market’ and the most popular meerkat tv shows.
In fairness anything with meerkats can’t fail. The meerkat site had nothing interesting on it! Wasted opportunity if you ask me. And also, meerkats *aren’t* russian! where do they get that from?
Simply, one of the best campaigns for a while.
Great blog post and I am really entertained by these stats. I personally can’t stand the advert, I find it irritating and quite frankly pointless. Yet it works. And the social planning behind it is brilliant. It is great to see creativity at work and that somebody somewhere has joined up the thinking to leverage the social space. Brilliant but please don’t make me watch that bloody advert again!!!
James
I hope they could make that stat grow at a rate that they could still provide quality. Cuil.com had experienced traffic jump like that but ended up zero. But the ad was amazing and that meerkat is good.
Googled just to see if they had a website given the interest and found it! V Funny and love that they decided Aleksandr was a Russian given that they actually come from the Kalahari desert area of Africa! Also the digs about mongooses as they are in fact related. Don’t tell Aleksandr that! LOL Actualy I don’t even have a car so completely NOT interested in the ‘real’ advert anyway.
this is a brilliant advert, “SIMPLES” classic, i never thought they actually made the website for real sheer brilliance.
This is the problem with people working in digital marketing vs true FMCG marketers. You are focusing on a 15000 contacts and get excited. You tube 5000, and then facebook
5000 (with a content that’s off strategy). Ask yourselves: how many contacts were generated by TV? We’ re talking millions. And how many digital cotabts themselves were generated by TV ? A lot of resource wasted…
you guys might appreciate this article I found on the new campaign: onthebutton.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/compare-the-meerkat/
I really enjoyed reading all the comments about the article around Compare the Meerkat but nobody seemed to overtly mention that the campaign was simply created for TV, then transcribed online due to the success and was built soley for brand awareness. Of course leads were required but the awareness on Compare the Market was the main brief. So did it work? Someone mentioned loads of Twitter followers and also Facebook fans but did this actually turn into chatter and therefore sales.
The answer is yes! So the campaign is brilliant. I have written a case study around the campaign with some good measurements within if anyone is interested in taking a look at the true halo effect Compare the Meerkat had on CompareTheMarket.com
http://www.graydudek.co.uk/2009/10/compare-the-meerkat-market-case-study/