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Priceless?

Published by karl May 4th, 2006 in PR, advertising, co-creation, micromarketing

Big TV Campaign - Several Million
Slick Web Site - $15,000
Trying to look like a blog - Priceless

No matter what response the guys at mastercard are getting with their “Write Your Own Priceless ad”, they could have spent about 10% of there budget and got 100 times the responses if they had used the viral nature of the web, blogs, and social software. Even GM executed their consumer generated content campaign better than this.

The call to action from the TV commercial drives people to the priceless.com website that seems to be a confusing combination of “blog like” articles, the “film festival”, “promotions” and of course the ability to enter the competition to “write your own priceless commercial”. There aren’t even any examples of entries that I could see.

priceless.com is a weekly adventure. A place for articles that will take you from the rare and the exotic to the everyday events that make life richer and more meaningful. On priceless.com, you’ll learn about everything from fashion to technology, from decorating your home to traveling around the world. In addition, you’ll also find the best that MasterCard has to offer, including promotions and sponsorships that will enhance and complement your lifestyle.

I’m sure they would argue that they didn’t want to write a blog, hence the reverse chronology of weekly articles that are strewn with links (to products you can buy with mastercard I assume), oh and with a “tell a friend” link at the bottom. Ha, tell a friend is a half hearted attempt by someone to make it “viral” (as I’ve said before). Of course because they haven’t got comments, or trackbacks, or tags, or flickr photos they can’t take advantage of all the traffic that they are driving to the “priceless.com” site from their, admittedly lovely commercials.

I’m sure many people would be able to give me some numbers that make all the money dumped into this campaign a success, but answer this one question, why is it when I do a search on google for “priceless” Mastercard isn’t even on the front page?

I think it’s because no one cares.

Now I think this is a very funny “priceless” spoof: