Will Comcast’s Unhappy Customers Show Them How To Die?
I was watching John Batelle’s opening remarks at the Conversational Marketing Summit at San Francisco’s Presidio last Tuesday afternoon; the entire event surrounds trends in marketing that involve the consumer, presumably as a co-creator of marketing content.
I was introduced to the people sitting on both sides of me, and, two people to my right was a guy from Comcast. I turned to the guy to my right and said, “Man, has that guy been on the blogs this week? They’ve been getting slaughtered.” The guy shrugged his shoulders and said, “Uh, I don’t know,” which made me wonder what the hell he was doing at a conversational marketing event if he wasn’t aware of the Comcast situation, but I digress..
Ad Age’s Bob Garfield, among others, has been going ballistic about Comcast, and Jeff Jarvis (Dell Hell) took his tragicomic account of waiting for the cable guy and kicked it to the next level: stating that “every company — every industry — that makes its money by screwing its customers is doomed.” Well, he’s got a point here.
The kids today aren’t really just into being spoon-fed professionally made content. In fact, according to a Deloitte study referenced on David Weinberger’s blog last week, stated that Millenials (yes, I’m officially old because I called people aged 13-24 the kids) are adopting new forms of content consumption faster than ever, but all generations are demanding UGC faster than ever. Essentially, 51% of the Internet is watching user-generated content. That is, one half is watching what the other half if saying.
When Garfield challenges Comcast’s unhappy customers to start an anti-advertising campaign, customercials, to make a video explaining why the cable behemoth sucks so bad, he’s already a week or two late. Jeremy told me about the infamous sleeping Comcast technician video posted on YouTube a year ago.
This video is so popular (over 1 million views) that it actually comes up on the first page of Google and Yahoo for search-rankings, so it goes without saying that customercials can have enormous effect, especially when they’re highly viewed on video portals like YouTube. Will videos like this have a long-term pervasive effect on conversations about brands? Absolutely.
But until the other day it wasn’t empirically clear that a majority of the customer marketplace was listening to the content-creators among them. To quote one of my favorite consumer advocates, Garth Algar: “Game On.”
Comcast Customercial Link Love:
What’s Your Brand Mantra: I Hate Comcast
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