The end of blog marketing is near, that’s for sure. Instead of asking bloggers to place ads or to give them stuff to try out in exchange for a review, Belgian agency Duval Guillaume asked two Flemish bloggers (asfaltkonijn.be & stew.be) to create a commercial clip to give the campaign some extra buzz in the blogosphere. The two heroes sacrificed their blogging souls for a small monetary token of appreciation and a short period of fame and attention and started working. Although in the Middle Ages, it used to be a job for the local town idiot/fool to entertain people, nowadays you can ask bloggers, apparently. You’d think the agency would select a matter close to the bloggers and their lifestyle, and yeah, maybe it is… Who knows? I just find it a pretty risky precedent.
The campaign itself is for VLAM and it concerns the promotion of… cheese. Somewhere in Flanders, on 4 locations, cheese is hidden and people are invited to guess the location by means of visual hints with pictures. Although the campaign is promoting Belgian cheese, the four locations are Flanders-based. It’s not that we don’t like the south side of Belgium, but umm… yeah. That’s a small detail with a long story, probably. On the product site [www.belgischekazen.be] extra video, audio and textual snippets help visitors in their quest for the precious fungified milk. If you smell guess the location, you can win a cheese buffet at the comfortable altitude of 50 meters with 20 of your friends. Other prizes are: a boat trip with cheese picnic for 8 people, 10 cheese baskets or 100×4 entry tickets for ye olde cheese factory ‘Passendale’.
So. Is this campaign in any way related to blogging, bloggers or the blogosphere? No. Is there a link between the product and the blogs? No. Is the clip funny? Umm, apart from being a semi-clone of the Flemish Trigger Happy’s bunnies (two guys in bunny suits acting ridiculous in the city) and the Pac-Man at the university gag, it sometimes almost is. The overal feeling is that this is an attempt to become viral, based on leeching on the bloggers’ social networks. Judge for yourself, see the clip (some Dutch language present).
There is, however, a very cute visual for the campaign, something Duval is actually pretty good at. That’s about the only thing I like about this campaign. It’s true that this is ‘the first time in Belgium an agency asks bloggers to create a commercial for a product’. Let’s hope it’s the last time, or that the bloggers will get some sort of media training in advance. For that small compensation, I’d hardly call it ‘freelanced’ or ‘outsourced’ work. I wouldn’t exactly compare it to sweatshops either, I’m sure it was a fun afternoon and all that, but I’d never sign up for a proposal like this. I’d feel juuuust a little abused. But hey, that’s just me… ranting. You should probably just ignore this.
Copy:
“Find the cheese and win
Participate on belgischekazen.be”
Agency: Duval Guillaume