I Have Said It Once And I Will Say It Again…Content Is King

As I do every morning I go over my blog reader and catch up on my blog reading. This post from Advertising Age caught my eye:

AT&T’s iJustine Web Series Doesn’t Exactly Go Viral

YouTube Stars as Spokesmodels May not Be Such a Great Idea After All

Posted by Michael Learmonth on 11.24.08 @ 04:51 PM

What do you do if you’re a big mobile carrier hoping to connect with digital youth? Tap a YouTube “star” and a popular blogger to extol the virtues of AT&T mobile phones.

The premise of AT&T’s series is that iJustine and blogger Karen Nguyen get lost together in various locales such as Austin and Anchorage, and have to solve various mysteries of their surroundings using AT&T phones.

That was the idea behind AT&T’s “Lost in America” campaign with iJustine (Justine Ezarik) and blogger Karen Nguyen. But the result is an example of how YouTube fame tends not to translate outside the world of “Fred,” “kevjumba” and “sxephil.”

The premise of the series is that the two get lost together in various locales such as Austin and Anchorage, and have to solve various mysteries of their surroundings using AT&T phones (“It is a slick phone; it’s so tiny!”).

So far, AT&T and its vloggers have published 11 episodes, produced by Tremor Media, but it’s hard to imagine anyone watching more than one, if that. The series is heavy on AT&T, but light on storyline, unless you find it interesting that Justine could be booted out of the competition if she drops her phone a fifth time.

After two weeks, the series had generated just 31,000 views across YouTube, MySpace and four other sites, according to web video distribution firm Tubemogul. The only reason they racked up that many is that iJustine posted episodes one and six on her blog, bringing in 20,000 of that total.

Okay if you want to read more about the article just follow the link up top.

So why am I sharing this? To make the point again that content is king. This campaign seems to have everything it needed to be huge.  There was (in list form of course, cause people like lists):

-Ijustine (a very popular personality on the web)

-Karen Nguyen

-AT&T

-Use of video that can go viral

So what went wrong? In my opinion not knowing any of the folks involved directly other then Ijustine (full disclosure:I have known her for a few years very casually, as most social media folks do) is content.

The finished content was just okay.   It really didn’t grab you. It didn’t make me want to check back in each episode.  I didn’t feel at least two emotions It didn’t make me really feel the need to see what was happening each episode. I just did not care.

Now in all fairness what they did was really well done and hey 30,000+ views is nothing to sneeze at. (Though an average Ijustine video alone gets around 20,000 views like this one of her dead fish, they were hoping for a lot more no doubt.)

Plus, look I am blogging about it, so there is all the online chatter that needs to be taking into consideration.

One thing of social media note, I do find interesting is that I was really unaware of this campaign till the Ad Age blog post. It makes me wonder was there a social media competent to it? Were any social networking sites involved? Blogger outreach? Also how can i send the video to friends, I do not see a way to forward the content on from the video page.

So my point was it as Ad Age makes it seem a total bust? No. Could it have had better content and a stronger social media competent? Yes.