nice campaign & social integration for L'Odyssée de Cartier

by Kevin Doohan in ,

I was watching The Good Wife on CBS tonight and saw a mindblowingly long and beautiful ad from Cartier.  @jdoohan and I were transfixed as a snow leopard and golden dragon entertained us in a gem filled fantasy world created by Cartier.  Check out the embedded spot from YouTube below.  The video shows 72,160 views as of me writing this blog post. It's going to get A LOT bigger.

I posted a link to the video on facebook praising Cartier for having the courage and vision to buy such a long spot during primetime and for producing a beautiful piece of content.  In a comment on my post, one of my teammates from Red Bull told me he thinks Cartier roadblocked the spot across broadcast networks.  This is even more impressive... Joan Chow, our CMO (and my boss) when I was at ConAgra Foods, used to talk about "breaking through the fog of familiarity".  This ad "broke through the fog of familiarity" at my house for sure.

I went back to the YouTube homepage to search for the video to get the total views so far and noticed a homepage takeover. Another opportunity to high-five the Cartier team.  They're making sure as many people as possible can discover and see this spot with the YouTube takeover.  I know from experience that the YouTube homepage isn't the most efficient buy ever but it absolutely belongs in a digital media takeover for a piece of content like this.

screencap of YouTube takeover for L'Odyssée de Cartier campaign 

I went back to facebook to add to the comments on my wall and suggest that my teammates check the Cartier campaign website because it also makes a great impression.  

Upon my return to facebook...BOOM - I saw a Sponsored Story (pictured left) including a reference one of my friends who likes Cartier. Sorry for exposing you're my friend Corey... I know it might be embarassing. ;)

The Sponsored Story linked to Cartier's facebook campaign page which has 445,529 likes as of me writing this blog post.   It will be interesting to watch the likes increase as the campaign continues.

I'm impressed. Cartier bought a broadcast television roadblock for a beautiful and innovative 3:30 spot.  They made sure it was available online at their website, on YouTube, and on facebook.  They then invested in a YouTube takeover and facebook Sponsored Stories to make sure consumers can DISCOVER the video and the supplemental content.

The major social media channel missing from the campaign in my view was twitter. I didn't see any Promoted Trends, Promoted Accounts, or Promoted Tweets. This feels like a missed opportunity.  Others were reacting to the spot like I was.  I easily found them via a twitter search.  That's the problem...I had to search.  I wonder if Cartier considered including twitter in the campaign.  In my experience, twitter might have performed the best of any social media choice for driving traffic to the video.  twitter's platform is made to capitalize on real-time experiences like this synchronized takeover and can route traffic quickly to where the action is.  Alternatively, Cartier could have driven views of the YouTube hosted video via inline plays on twitter web.  It just depends on what the brand's activity goals are for the campaign.

I've embedded three tweets below (thanks to twitter's excellent & newish tweet embed capability).  They're great and show that consumers were mostly getting it.  These tweets could have been even more powerful if they were connected to a promoted campaign hashtag or were RTs of something Cartier created in advance with perfect messaging and pinned at the top of the twitter feed.

I really love this campaign and will watch as it continues. It's nice work from Cartier.  I love to see them raising the bar for creative and standing out on broadcast.  Once they did, they had most of their social media bases covered including paid options.  My only question/comment is why twitter wasn't included.  twitter would have been a must for me.