Sometimes in marketing getting initial visitors to your site can be a very large hurdle to overcome. Sometimes your audience is too busy to read your blog posts, listen to your podcasts, or follow you on social media, and they likely don’t know who you are. But, if you can provide a moment that people simply can’t ignore, those strangers will actively seek you out to learn about you. For today’s post, we’re going to take a look at a few examples of marketing content or events that use spectacles that worked.
Improv Everywhere
Charlie Todd is an interesting person that you’ve probably never heard of. He gave a TED talk in May of 2011 about his experiences forming an improvisation group called Improv Everywhere and the experience of creating shared absurdity. These projects sometimes include thousands of people who volunteer to take part in an event of ridiculousness. Some of their projects include the Annual No Pants Subway Ride in New York City, the High Five Escalator, and my personal favorite: The Frozen Grand Central.
Why this works
One of the central ideas that Charlie Todd focused on in his TED talk was that what he loved seeing in his projects were people who were not part of the project connecting to others who were also experiencing the absurdity. A knowing smile or pointing and giggling were the marks of strangers collectively experiencing and enjoying a spectacle like the ones Improv Everywhere created and would remember being a part of. Also, if people observing the spectacle were not already recording the event on their mobile device, you can be sure they were going to look up the event as soon as they got home.
Monty Python’s 50ft Dead Parrot
This parrot is no more. He has ceased to be. He’s expired and gone to meet his maker. This is an ex-parrot!
To celebrate the broadcast of the Monty Python Live (Mostly) farewell show, a British TV channel worked with sculptors for the creation and installation of a 50ft. statue of a dead Norwegian Blue parrot from Monty Python’s famous Dead Parrot Sketch. The statue was unveiled on London’s South Bank and was certainly an incredible spectacle.
Why this works
Let’s face it, the statue of a giant dead parrot laying on London’s South Bank is impossible to ignore. Fans of Monty Python will immediately recognize the joke and will seek out the reason for the giant Norwegian Blue. Those who are unfamiliar with Monty Python will see the giant parrot, wonder why, actively seek out, and most likely run into montypython.com where they can learn about the broadcast. This trail of interaction is what spectacles are designed to cause. Moving people from a non-digital space to our own digital space and convert strangers into customers.
Ze Frank and the Earth Sandwich
We’re going to finish off today’s post with a spectacle that began online and moved into reality. Ze Frank rose to web-video stardom in the mid-2000s when he created a website designed for a community to interact on the internet. He hosted a video show every day for a year where he challenged and invited his viewers to complete various tasks such as dressing up their vacuums, creating beautiful origami out of hate mail, and genuinely trying to create a space where people could connect and interact. His projects routinely bordered on the ridiculous and Ze essentially became a spectacle that lived on the internet and affected reality when he interacted with the community.
The pinnacle of this spectacle affecting real life was when he challenged his viewers to synchronize placing two slices of bread on the ground at exact opposite points of the earth thus making an earth sandwich.
Why this works
What Ze Frank accomplished with his internet community he collected is certainly incredible. But the reason it worked was he became a spectacle that people wanted to interact with. People wanted to be part of the community that knew who Ze was and participate in his projects which would then connect even more people to Ze.
If you’re curious about more of Ze’s projects, you can check out his TED Talk.
To wrap up
What all of these spectacles have in common is the fact that, for the people who see them, they create a desire to learn more about what they saw and actively seek out others who experienced it as well. While all of these spectacles are enormous and possibly borderline ridiculous, they also try to accomplish what ecommerce businesses do every day: create content to attract strangers to our product, entice them to become visitors, and convert them into customers.