Long-time blog fans will know of my love for Conan O’Brien, and it turns out not only is he still king of late night comedy, he’s also king of publicity. To promote his new show on TBS, Conan and his staff did a ton of stunts, videos, Tweets, and more, including one event that I’ll highlight here: buying a blimp.
Conan was quick to remind viewers that he is the only talk-show host ever to have his own blimp, and he took every opportunity to use it to his advantage. By combining real life blimp action with extremely close social media coverage, Conan created more attention for floating vinyl than ever before. Conan sent the blimp to hover over baseball stadiums during the playoffs, and flew all around the states and Los Angeles where the show was set to be filmed. While this happened, he filmed commercials in the blimp both for rotation on TBS and YouTube, videos which collected over 800,000 hits on YouTube. Viewers could also track the blimp with a special Conan badge on Foursquare, in real-time on Google Maps, while his nearly 2 million Twitter followers received frequent Tweets from Conan about the blimp’s movements, and pictures were constantly made available on Flickr.
Whew! With all the social media coverage that Conan employed, he also generated a ton of buzz from media such as The New York Times, USA Today, and television news all over the country, making his return to television a widely celebrated and noticed event.
I love campaigns that integrate multiple media the way this one did. As you point out, the campaign turned something normally pretty ordinary into a chatter-worthy event... and garnered media and online attention for the trouble. Nice!
ReplyDeletethanks Melanie!
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