I took part in Melbourne’s first Marketing Podcast Smackdown. It was an awesome collaboration between Marketing Today and The Gen Y Podcast. The recording revolved around a debate on whether Viral Marketing was a waste of money, with the heads that we had conversing in that room it was always going to be a great debate.
Another great collaboration that I am loving at the moment is Hilltop Hoods (my favourite Australian Hip Hop act) who have just come together with the smart Australian outfit Lowrider to remix the HH classic Roll On Up.
‘I didn’t touch his fucking dick’ ‘Puck You Miss’ ‘That so random!’
Have you heard any of these saying in the last week?
Summer Heights High is everywhere, it has even started to infect the lexicon of many Young Australians.
In the 1960’s, Ernest Dichter the ‘father of motivational research’ changed the way we look at word of mouth with his seminal article ‘How Word of Mouth Advertising Works’. He came up with four motivations for people to pass on commercial messages. They were Product involvement, Self involvement, Other involvement (altruism) and Message involvement.
Message Involvement involved a thing called ‘verbal play’; this is when an aspect of an advertisement campaign is repeated between friends, it may range from a catchy tune to certain behaviour. This behaviour is then repeated in a number of times in differing environments.
This is what is occurring with Summer Heights High at the moment. My week at Australian Uni Games made it interesting to see ‘message involvement’ play out. Words had been intertwined into a lot of the conversations I was having. It seems each week the audience is given a new lexicon of terms to use. People who did not watch the show felt left out of the joke, when it came around to Wednesday night, we had a few SHH virgins watching for the first time. Through the fear of being on the outer, people watched the show to make sure they were in on the joke the next time around. The original audience is acting as the salesmen for the shows future episodes.
SHH has gone beyond verbal play outs as well, the other day while checking a friends facebook I had seen that someone had used the graffiti function which allows others to draw on friends walls and they had done the ‘dicktation’ symbol from the first episode.
Update I took of the comments on this post because it was getting filled with Spam. If you have something to add feel free to comment it on the other post. Damn SPAMMERS!
At least in one conversation a day I will hear some reference to Summer Heights High. The ABC show has reached tipping point. SHH is a comedy mockumentary about two students (Jonah Takalua and Ja’mie King) and a drama teacher (Mr. G) at a Public School in Melbourne.
The show is a run away success but there are a number of other interesting phenomena happening around the show. The support online for the show is phenomenal. I think this is so important for television shows because people can immerse themselves to a deeper level and interact with the content at different times. For instance I had some friends over for dinner last night and we went on youtube and watched the Jonah Montage from last episode.
The following is a documentation of the support from Social Media for the television show.
1. Vodcast They have decided to release it on vodcast. It is now the highest rating Podcast in Australia after only 2 episodes. Following the success of the ABC’s The Chaser War on Everything and Media Watch vodcasts.
2. Online Social Networks They have also set up Myspace Pages for the characters. The reason the Myspace page works so well is the constant information stream, people have something new to say every week after the episodes are released. Ja’mie King currently has 24,000 plus friends.
There are a number of facebook groups in their name two of the most popular
They have also released video montages of the specific characters, my favourite being Jonah has had 150,000 hits for his first play and 23,000 for his second.
Homesite They home site leaves a lot to the imagination with a dress up game which is an email to a friend. Would of worked better if it was an application on Facebook which people could send to friends.
I haven’t finished with this beast called Summer Heights High in future weeks I will be posting on SHH and;
