Vampires App Gets Sony Brand Money

Helping big brands find their way through the online advertising thicket is one of the biggest revenue opportunities for almost any kind of online media property outside of search.

Every brand is a snowflake.  Each one is unique and has distinct needs and a precious soul that the brand guys call the “brand essence”.   While they all want to connect with their consumers online,  they want to do it in a way that supports the “essence” of the brand.  At the very least, they don’t want to anything that might jeopardize the brand equity that they have spent decades building.   That leads them to try to control almost everything about how and where their brand is presented, and who can blame them.

The problem is that its a wild and woolly world  out there on the world wide web.   Youtube is almost all user generated video.  Myspace and Facebook are full of crazy kids writing on each others walls and god knows what lurks out there in the blogosphere.  Thats scary stuff if you are used to spending 98% of your brand budget offline where you can do stuff like sponsor a PBS series.

So it is nice to read that Sony spent some brand money to great effect on facebook through RockYou.  It was a promotion for their new vampire movie, 30 days of night.  They did it by sponsoring the existing “vampires” application that has more than 3 million installs on facebook.   The price wasn’t disclosed, but it looks like they got millions of impressions and tens of thousands of sweepstakes entries.

Good for Sony, good for RockYou and good for Facebook.   It’s a step in the right direction.  An eensy weensy minuscule little step in the right direction.

Posted: February 25th, 2008 | Author: admin | Filed under: Social Media | View Comments

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