Everyone knows that word of mouth advertising is among the most effective type available. When your friend tells you to try something new, you’re far more likely to give it a shot than if you simply see a commercial with some random actors trying to explain why they love the product. The problem for marketers is that it is almost impossible to scale up the effectiveness to the large campaigns most companies want. That is, until today. A partnership announced late last week matches the popular video generating platform VideoGenie with the media platform Moontoast.
Together these two companies are giving people the platform to create high quality video testimonials & advertisements for the companies they love. These advertisements can then be shared on their newsfeed in Facebook as official advertisements from select companies. Of course, the companies will have the ability to approve or deny any advertisement from becoming an official ad before it is published.
When an ad is published to someone’s news feed the person who published it will be effectively promoting this company directly to their friends and family through a medium that they are already used to, Facebook. These individuals can then share the ad with their friends and even add on additional comments or video testimonials to the original ad to make it even more compelling. The hope for companies using this type of advertising is that these ads will quickly go viral showing their products and real world testimonials to millions of people.
Several major companies have apparently already signed on to this new platform and more will certainly follow suit as they learn about this new and innovative marketing strategy. Eventually the service will be expanded out to smaller companies and even individual marketers. What types of steps will be taken to prevent false advertisements from being created has yet to be announced, but it seems like that will be an important part of keeping these types of ads relevant. Having dozens of ‘Fiverr’ gigs creating these apparently authentic advertisements would only reduce the effectiveness of these ads.
The idea as it stands today, however, seems like an exciting opportunity for the advertising and marketing world to continue to become more social. Would you use this type of advertising for your product or services? I’m interested to see what kinds of costs or payment structure will be set up around this. I believe this type of service has a lot of potential and is definitely something I’ll be watching closely as more details come out.
