In defense of Ted from Accounting
A few weeks ago, I read an article on Mashable bashing Cisco’s attempt to copy Old Spice’s genius video campaign which went viral on YouTube and Twitter. The article was called Cisco Apes Old Spice Campaign, No One Notices. Now granted, maybe they were right -- I didn’t actually notice the Cisco campaign until I read the article on Mashable…but I still think you’ve got to give Cisco props for trying.
For those of you who have been living under a rock (or don’t work in social media), here’s an example of one of the Old Spice clips -- in a nutshell, they made video replies to people on Twitter.
And here is Ted from Accounting…
Even the screenshot gives you a pretty good idea of what happened here.
Okay, granted Ted is not as fun to watch, but it was a way for Cisco to jump on the bandwagon while people were still talking about Old Spice. It’s not easy to take a clever, sexy idea from B2C marketing and applying it to B2B. It isn’t always clear how — or if — it will work. Sure, maybe there was a way they could have done it different, or better. But at least they tried. And with a total of several thousand views on YouTube, I don’t think you can really call that a #FAIL.
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