How Lava Iris X5 used Video content and YouTube Evangelists to Introduce the ‘Selfie’ Phone

They say “pictures speak louder than words.” And what did they say about a combination of pictures put together? You’re about to find out. Yes, we’re talking about Video content! The arguably old age technique to put your product out there just got a lot more impetus with the entry of YouTube pre-roll ads, YouTube channels and YouTube evangelists that the world is listening to. Marketers today have realised the importance of this and are effectively leveraging the popularity of these YouTube Heros; Lava Iris being no exception.

Video content is the driving force where this form of content allows you to step up a notch from the conventional 30 second ad films to full-fledged 3 minute videos all of which are intentionally being watched buy the average consumer. The 30 seconds have also been compressed into 7-15 second videos on Social Media; all of these being in the form of vine, Instagram videos and YouTube videos.

First here’s a few live examples of brands that have already extensively used Video content to market themselves.

• Sony’s “Inception“ Vine: The 6 second video showing Sony’s new product
• Snap deal India Alok Nath timeliness: Using Alok Nath to promote the Snapdeal Savings Day.
• Oreo Game of Thrones surprise Death: When a surprise Death took place on the season 1 of Game of Thrones.
• Adidas World Cup Soccer Balls: The timeline of the Football World Cup Footballs
• Nike Football: Football tricks for the juggler inside you.
• Quit Smoking: The quit smoking 6 second vine campaign.

And now for how Lava Iris X5 used video as a tool to market their new selfie centred phone. The phone was launched in September 2014 and 2 months into the launch Lava Iris X5 was launched the DSA – ‘Dumb Selfie Anonymous’

Objectives

The objectives of this simplistic video campaign were rather straightforward i.e. tell the world a new phone has launched. The launch though had to induce this sense of addiction, and what better way to do it than to play on the new age obsession with. you guessed it – Selfies!! Enter The Lava Iris X5 Selfie phone.

Execution

The team at Lava Iris played up the selfie addiction and created “The DSA”. An association to eradicate the taking of Dumb Selfies and replace them with something better. And how? Through the use of a better phone of course. But that’s not what was done directly.

The team partnered with Being Indian, the YouTube channel and created the following video.

Disclaimer: The following content is strictly meant for those aware of the concept of the selfie and for those who have seen themselves in the compromising position of being a part of an embarrassing selfie.

As evident from the video people take dumb selfies and are often embarrassed of it, but still take a fancy to it.

The objective of the campaign was to ensure that this habit is put an end to and is replaced by good selfies.
The way to do that is through a good phone, which can help even an amateur photographer.

The placement of the product, is subtle and implicit and doesn’t push the phone into your face throughout the video. It in fact reinstates an entire concept of the Dumb Selfie and the places the phone/mentions the phone at the end as if it were a divine “moral of the story”.

Positives

Though the video campaign doesn’t focus as much on the phone as it does on the concept of the Dumb Selfie, the product placement in the video more than sums up for a well-executed campaign that doesn’t irritate the viewer with ‘in your face’ marketing tactics.

This ideally is the kind of stuff that is well appreciated by the viewer’s especially for its subtlety in execution and the idea behind the entire campaign.

Scope for Improvement

The only scope for ‘improvement’ visible to me after seeing the video would be a demand for a longer video, or maybe a sequel to the above video.

Conclusion

To sum up, videos are taking centre stage today on Social Media and static content like images are being used as ancillary elements to support marketing initiatives by big brands.

YouTube Pre-rolls and videos seem to be the future of Digital in the years to come and evidently generate revenue for Video platforms.

This could maybe even mean the entry of new video platforms (over and above Vine and Instagram videos), new YouTube ad forms and a diligently dedicated budget only to YouTube with a larger emphasis on it.