Web[2.0]xploitation
If Marshall McLuhan was right with his “the medium is the message” theory, then media should be always examined through the lens of semiotics. The science and art of communication, now more than ever, tries to conciliate several layers of meaning, which sometimes come together as a cohesive experience without loosing its discrete parts. The medium can contribute with meaning as much as the message itself, and in the age of media fragmentation, most pieces of communication involve voluntarily or involuntarily more than one channel, which means that the message can be either amplified or distorted depending on how well coordinated are all the parts involved.
“Media” and “Creative” as communication disciplines are merging into a hybrid that can’t differentiate the what from the how, and this is evident when considering recent work in the digital marketing arena crafted by fashion design brand Diesel, which just provided an excellent example that might help us get better at understanding the new dynamics of communication.
Regardless of whether or nor it was a good marketing program, the Heidies could be seen as an experiment which relied on almost every Web 2.0 vehicle on the catalogue, offering an interesting multi-media case study of modern communication. The program consisted on the hijacking of Diesel.com by a group of hipsters that pretended to also hold hostage one of their salesman together with the complete [new] underwear collection, here is their first message:
From the beginning it was apparent that the whole effort was yet another guerrilla initiative by a brand seeking to connect with a specific group of people, in other words that it was advertising. The tone of the communication made clear that they were letting consumers participate in the joke; this probably gave the program a more relaxed character as the intent was to have fun, to let people interact with advertising as opposed to be interrupted by it.
In the process of letting people in, the brand employed a number of media channels that not only disseminated the campaign with the speed of light but that carried their own messages that could ease the connection with a young, tech savvy, and highly connected crowd.
Most of the video content on the Heidies’ site was streamed from uploaded versions residing in You Tube; this was an interesting move [as opposed to create their own media player with pristine quality video] because it sent a message of approachability, opening various forums at the same time as people could comment on their site and on You Tube. It also provided the tools to any website in the world [i.e. blogs like this one] to spread the word through embedded video. It is worth to consider the implications on the message of streaming a You Tube video on their site, that is, a video with the You Tube logo on the lower right corner.
Needless to say, the site also featured a blog in which the hijackers webcasted live feeds from their base and posted random messages, received comments from fans and detractors, and replied to them. The blog, as a communications channel, follows a structure that also carries its own messages. It might be hard to pinpoint exactly what those messages are but it is easy to at least infer certain openness and even transparency when you are able to post comments at will regardless of whether they are positive, negative, insulting, or encouraging. Here is an example:
A very visual campaign for a very visual product: underwear. The site documented every step of the hijacking with plenty of still images, click on any of them and you will be directed to a Flickr page titled “Heidie1And2's photos,” where users can also leave comments and browse through all the images available on the official site and beyond. From the marketing point of view there is a clear benefit on this move: as in the You Tube case, every picture is properly tagged and can therefore be found by anyone searching on the site, which can then lead that individual to Diesel’s site.
Polls were also another resource used within the site to keep people engaged and participating, there are various new web2.0ish polling tools that allow anyone to embed a professionally-looking survey/results application, this can help any blogger [or any site for that matter] to create a sense of community even if a superficial one, in which people can validate their own opinions and get deeper into the story.
Since news these days constantly cross the line between seriousness and dead seriousness, why not adding this event to the Digg community. With one click any user could digg the story titled “Diesel.com has been hacked!” which generated 27 diggs and a few, mainly favorable comments. Lastly, the hijackers opened their own del.icio.us page in which they posted the links of anyone that referenced their site during the period of the campaign, so far 81 links are available, exposing media accounts from widely diverse sources.
Over 288 friends on their MySpace page might be one of the many indicators of their popularity [or lack of, depending on your benchmarks], it can also be considered as another version of the official site that lives beyond the campaign and that also gives the brand the credibility and platform to confabulate its next comeback together with the community that loved and/or hated them throughout the ad that lasted five days.
