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March 29, 2024

Cool Contest Embraces Video…and Self-Promotion

Important Details: Want to promote your online news site? Want to look cool in doing it? Publishers might normally call a meeting, discuss it at length and issue an RFP for a with-it marketing company to come up with something fresh.

TheFirstPost,
a London-based original news-and-commentary site, akin to the U.S.’s Slate and Salon, took a different tack. Offering its first TheFirstPost Viral Competition, it offered prizes for promotional online video. First prize: £5000, with lesser prizes of £2500 and £500 for runners-up. The winners of course are now all over YouTube, merrily promoting the online new site at no further cost, and looking cool in the bargain.

In Outsell’s Opinion: It’s a fascinating notion: get outside the heads of the people working inside the traditional news enterprise to figure out how to promote the enterprise. In this case, the cheeky British news site is promoting its online product. The kicker image, ironically, is a newspaper leaping out of the desktop computer, which also produces pizza and coffee of course. The idea is worth stealing, uh, borrowing. More than that, it’s worth asking readers to do more than produce promotional videos. How about asking them how they’d like to see a video presentation of the news, or prep sports, or a weekend entertainment report? How about asking them to create some audio that might result in actual products a publisher — or a talented amateur — could produce? It’s an endless mix-and-match universe — connecting creative readers (and would-be ones) with the business problems of the enterprise. And you get page views every time somebody views the entries. Now that’s a model for publishers that could be cool, cheap and productive.