Interesting how video-sharing has transformed the face of romance- we did a quick snapshot of Valentine’s on YouTube, and here’s what we found:

Highlights
We found that people were utilizing video sharing extensively:

– Over 1200 Valentine videos were added on the 14th, the vast majority of which were video ecards of widely varying quality. Some were the standard slow song + hearts + scripted “I love you”, while more original directors took advantage of the snow to scrawl out their messages.

– 5 Marriage proposals were contributed, bringing the total to 254 on the site, ranging from CG animated productions to balloon fly-bys, to more awkward productions.

– Interesting twists on the traditional for single users – one user fished for Valentine suitors with a rendition of “As Time Goes By” that garnered almost 60,000 views, over 450 comments and 20 video responses, while another user volunteered to be any single persons sweetheart via a personal email message, which generated a whopping 609,366 views as of this writing and over 2500 users took her up on her offer.

– Viral marketing pieces for Nokia and Siemens (set in the future) under the premise of being wedding proposals did not fare as well as their organic brethren, generating just under 3600 views for Nokia (in 11 months) while things look a bit better for Siemens which was viewed just over 6500 times since it launched Valentine’s Day.

iMedia Connection: The Snickers Factor: When Buzz Turns Bad - Thanks to iMedia for giving us this opportunity, and we’ve received a lot of great feedback so far on the piece, which is due to the great work the team here at NMS did in pulling the report together. I also wanted to emphasize a couple things in the article to be clear.

First off, the main angle was about how Snicker’s media strategy made it easier for their critics to attack them, and how that could be avoided in the future by other marketers. Why the creative offended people and whether or not Masterfoods would have been better off addressing the issues involved instead of selling product and promoting the brand is well beyond the scope of the article.

Second, the “five years ago” statement might have been an underestimation- the best comparison I’ve heard to date is to the Miller Lite “Catfight” spot, and that aired in 2003. Though it might be more valuable to the hypothetical question as to what the reaction to the “Mechanics” spot would have been if it featured two women, I think the fact that Miller was able to overcome the controversy and actually expand the schedule of the spot in the face of similar criticism is a testament to the growing influence of the consumer.

King Kaufman over at Salon.com has an interesting take on our Super Bowl report, along with pretty much everyone else’s that proclaimed Salesgenie.com’s spot to be the worst received by viewers. The premise is that even though we all proclaimed the ad to be disliked by the vast majority of people (by our measure, a whopping 88%), the ad was still a success, because Salesgenie.com met their lead targets. Now put aside for a minute that their goal of 700 leads out of a viewing audience of over a hundred million makes this one of the most disproportionate direct efforts with one of the lowest conversion rates in the history of marketing (their claimed response of 10,000 doesn’t improve it much). Also take away the long-term damage negative brand perception can have to a bottom line.

What needs to be clarified is what everyone was measuring- we, and everyone else, looked at how the average viewer perceived the ad, and in this case, everyone agreed that fans hated the spot. We made no assumptions about how each ad would affect a company’s bottom line or whether it was a smart use of the marketing budget. The experts were the fans, and another interesting development will be how many of those fans react well to the cheesy guy in a Corvette who tells them he found them via Salesgenie lead.

We have just released our Super Bowl buzz report, and we saw some interesting things that a lot of coverage missed – one of the most popular spots, after analyzing 12,000 discussions on millions of sites, was the CBS house spot featuring Dave Letterman and Oprah. It came in second to the Budweiser “Rock, Paper, Scissors” spot in volume and both spots generated an amazing 91% favorability rating. The most discussed spot, not surprisingly was the Snickers “Brokeback Mechanics” effort, which proved that not all buzz is positive. Lastly, the loser of the evening was Salesgenie.com, which hardly produced any positive feedback that we could detect. Our CEO Pete Snyder appeared on Fox News with Bill Hemmer to discuss our findings- check out the clip below: