Is YouTube An Oppportunity For Terrific Advertising Experiments?

Alex Konrad has written an article for Fortune titled, "Pepsi, Brewing up viral magic."   The article describes how Pepsi debuted a new "Uncle Drew" ad for Pepsi Max on YouTube.   According to the article, "In the five-minute clip, 'Uncle Drew' amuses, then mesmerizes, a pick-up basketball game and its fans with crossovers and dunks unbecoming of a white-bearded, paunch-carrying old man, and only possible because the true identity of 'Uncle Drew' was a carefully disguised young basketball star, the clip's writer-director Kyrie Irving."  (Irving is the former Duke player and current NBA Rookie of the Year who plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers).   What's interesting is where the ad went next... it is now appearing on television as a 30-second spot during the first few games of the NBA Finals between the Miami Heat and the Oklahoma City Thunder (go Thunder!). 

That progression is somewhat unique, going from YouTube to television.   I find it very interesting though, and I think more firms should emulate this strategy.  This story proves that firms can and should use YouTube not just as part of a social media marketing strategy... They should think of YouTube as a land of experimentation.   YouTube offers an inexpensive way to experiment with new ad strategies.  The cost of failure is minimal, and even the ads that don't become viral sensations can be "useful failures" in that they may provide powerful learning opportunities.  

If firms are to use YouTube as a powerful mechanism for low cost, low risk, fast experimentation, then they need to have clear methods of evaluating these experiments.  Konrad's article explains that Pepsi had just such a method of evaluation:

"Pepsi Max brand team member Sam Duboff, who led creation and development of the piece, says 'Uncle Drew' had to satisfy three major metrics in order to justify its adaptation into a television segment. 'Uncle Drew' had to keep viewers engaged, hit the brand's target demographic, and generate its own legs through word of mouth. With 80% of viewers watching through the 4-minute mark, a 82.1% male viewer group that skewed towards the brand's core 25-44 age group, and over 5 million views from embedded YouTube players suggesting the viewer watched over a media site or Facebook, Duboff and his team hit all three." 

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We Don't Learn More From Our Failures Than Our Successes!

Ok, I'm frustrated with the cliche, "You learn more from your failures than your successes." Why? Well, for starters, it's not entirely true! You learn most effectively when you can COMPARE AND CONTRAST SUCCESS AND FAILURE! In so doing, you develop a much more accurate understanding of cause-effect relationships. Consider the research of Schmuel Ellis and Inbar Davidi, which I described in my last book. These researchers examined after-event reviews conducted by Israeli military forces. They compared soldiers who conducted post-event reflection exercises after successful and unsuccessful navigation exercises with soldiers who only reviewed failures. The scholars found that “contemplation of successful events stimulated the learners to generate more hypotheses about their performance.” The soldiers who systematically analyzed both successes and failures developed richer mental models of cause and effect. Perhaps most importantly, these soldiers performed better on subsequent missions!

In addition to the importance of comparison and contrast, one other key psychological phenomenon makes the cliche problematic.  When we examine the causes of failure, we experience the fundamental attribution error.  When others fail, we look inside of them, and we blame their lack of knowledge, experience, and the like.  However, when we fail, we tend to look outside of ourselves. We blame "unexpected external forces" or some other cause not of our own doing.  The fundamental attribution error prevents us from learning effectively from our failures.

So, let's stop with the cliche!  We learn by comparing our successes and failures!

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Learning from Our Success and Others' Failures

Scholars KC Diwas, Bradley Staats, and Francesa Gino have conducted a new study about how we learn and improve (or fail to do so).  They examined Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery procedures.   Their research shows that individuals (cardiac surgeons in this case) learn more from their own success than the success of others.  Moreover, they learn more from others' failures than others' successes.   What explains these findings?  The scholars argue that we attribute our own success as well as others' failures to internal factors rather than external conditions.   When we succeed, we attribute it to our own effort and capabilities.  When we fail, we often blame "unexpected external factors or pressures."  On the other hand, when others fail, we tend to attribute the outcome to some deficiency on the part of that person (poor effort, planning, skills, etc.).  Finally, the study demonstrated that, "Individuals may be more open to reflect on their own failures and learn from them when they have greater experience with success." 

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The Heroic Failure Trophy

The Wall Street Journal has a terrific article today about Grey New York, an advertising agency.   The firm's leader, Tor Myhren, has created a quarterly "Heroic Failure" award to encourage innovative risk-taking.   It reminded me of the Build-A-Bear award program that I wrote about several years ago.    Here is an excerpt from what I wrote about the Build-A-Bear "Red Pencil" award program. 


[Build-A-Bear CEO Maxine] Clark has built an incredibly successful company, growing it to over $350 million in sales over the past decade. She has done so by delivering a world-class customer experience in her stores. Clark credits her store associates, who constantly find ways to innovate and improve. How do the associates do it? For starters, they tend not to fear admitting a mistake or surfacing a problem. Clark’s attitude toward mistakes explains her associates’ behavior. She does not punish people for making an error or bringing a problem to light; she encourages it.

Clark credits her first grade teacher, Mrs. Grace, for instilling this attitude toward mistakes in her long ago. As many elementary school teachers do, Mrs. Grace graded papers using a red pencil. However, unlike most of her colleagues, Mrs. Grace gave out a rather unorthodox award at the end of each week. She awarded a red pencil prize to the student who had made the most mistakes! Why? Mrs. Grace wanted her students engaged in the class discussion, trying to answer every question - no matter how challenging. As Clark writes, "She didn't want the fear of being wrong to keep us from taking chances. Her only rule was that we couldn't be rewarded for making the same mistake twice."  

Clark has applied her first grade teacher's approach at Build-a-Bear by creating a Red Pencil Award. She gives this prize to people who have made a mistake, but who have discovered a better way of doing business as a result of reflecting upon and learning from that mistake. Clark has it right when she says that managers should encourage their people to "experiment freely, and view every so-called mistake as one step closer to getting things just right." Of course, her first grade teacher had it right as well when she stressed that people would be held accountable if they made the same mistake repeatedly. Failing to learn constitutes the bad behavior that managers should deem unacceptable. Clark makes that point clear to her associates.

Excerpt from Michael A. Roberto, Know What You Don't Know, Wharton School Publishing, 2009.  

Quotes are from Maxine Clark's book, The bear necessities of business: Building acompany with heart.  John Wiley and Sons.  2006.

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The Bad Apple vs the Systemic View

Whenever an organizational experiences an accident, crisis, or scandal, many people rush to find fault. They want to identify the individuals to hold accountable. They ask about the CEO: What did he or she know and when did they know it? I think we have to resist this urge. We must adopt a more systemic view. In most cases, the problem stems from more than just one bad apple. Firing the bad apple might be appropriate, but that alone won't prevent a recurrence. The systemic issues must be addressed.

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