This month in the best content marketing of November, 2018: Apple kickstarts the holiday video extravaganza, YouTube erupted when Fiverr banned popular icon Voice Over Pete, and Payless played a prank on some social media influencers. Note: we’re fine with social media “influencers” getting trolled like this.
Big brands need big holiday ads, which get stretched into even bigger online content marketing extravaganzas. We expect to hear from British Airways, Sainsburys, and WestJet in December, but Apple got the ball rolling in November with this hopeful little ode to creativity.
Freelancer marketplace Fiverr doesn’t really have many famous freelancers. But it does, or rather, did, have Voice Over Pete, who has become a bit of a celebrity in the gaming community for his sportscaster-like vocal qualities. However, Fiverr banned Voice Over Pete this month for unspecified offences. At the time, Voice Over Pete had around 250 unfulfilled requests on Fiverr, representing about $12,000 worth of work. So what’s a voice over artist to do? Well, Pete made this funny video, which he then used to relaunch himself as a freelancer, sans Fiverr. Now he’s making thousands of dollars once more, and Fiverr won’t get a cut. See? Even if your business is just you, you too can make sharable content marketing.
This month, Starbucks announced that they were banning porn in their cafes. Well, technically, porn had always been banned. But now they were adding a filter to their WiFi so that porn would automatically be banned. Most people thought that this was already the case and were confused by the news. Not YouPorn. One of their VPs circulated a memo stating that Starbucks is now banned at YouPorn. This memo presumably took seconds to put together, but it got coverage from places like TMZ,Esquire,Mashable,the Mirror, and more. Sometimes you can earn a whole lot of coverage with minimal but highly strategic content.
Payless Shoes thought it would be funny to open up a pop-up store in LA, pretend it by a designer named Palessi, and then throw a big brand launch. You know the type: champagne, DJ, dedicated Instagram account. They invited a bunch of social media influencers and let them pay what they thought the shoes were worth, which turned out to be hundreds of dollars. After getting some good footage of shocked influencers finding out they overpaid for $20 shoes, Payless returned the money but got a pretty good ad campaign. As with many marketing stunts, though, there’s a content marketing angle. Mainly, places like CNN,MarketWatch,Forbes,CTV, and other news media ran segments or wrote articles on the story. It’s also a cautionary tale on the perils of “influencer” marketing.
Alright, one more Christmas video.