Caterer.com - Little Gordon

• Brand Caterer.com
• Project Little Gordon
• Service Social Video Advertising
• Date 29 July 2008
• Headline 2.4m+ plays led to massive media and trade press coverage

Background: Little Gordon

Little Gordon is a series of three films featuring a nine-year-old schoolboy tearing his blond, bouffant hair out as he mimics the foul-mouthed tirades of Gordon Ramsay for hospitality recruitment website Caterer.com. In the first clip, he castigates his mother for his ‘anaemic’ packed lunches, next berates a helpless waiter who can't deliver his food on time, and finally hauls his dinner ladies over the coals about the quality of the sausages. Part the first follows...

Part 2 | Part 3

Challenge: fuel publicity

Caterer.com wanted to boost brand awareness and generate publicity, giving the brand character and connecting it with the diverse range of people working in hospitality. Rebel Virals, who planned and shot the films, asked Unruly to create momentum through organic and commercial distribution that could then be leveraged by PR.

Solution: phased distribution

Unruly executed a three-phase campaign across a range of targeted websites, social networks and video sharing sites over a six-week period. Phasing the release of the clips enabled us to capitalize on interest in the first film and keep the momentum going over the summer holiday season. The activity was supported by a microsite, a YouTube channel, and a Facebook page.

Results: social video success triggers massive press coverage

• 2.4m+ video views
• 312 blogs linking to videos and microsite
• 2,334 Facebook fans

Unruly's activity generated hundreds of blog posts and quickly had the series hitting over 1m views on YouTube. This achievement led to massive coverage in the press, including pieces in The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Daily Star, The Mirror, The Telegraph, The Guardian, Metro, The London Paper, and FHM. It also led to coverage in  trade press titles, foodie blogs and forums including Serious Eats, Food Evaluation, Eat Me Daily, and Food Network Fans.

This was capped by radio coverage on The Chris Moyles Show on Radio 1 and The Michael Ball Show on Radio 2, plus international coverage in the New York Magazine and an interview with Gordon Ramsey on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

Gordon Ramsey himself is now a big fan of the Little Gordon. He screens the films at his own cooking shows and even flew out the child star, Felix, to LA to terrorize contestants in Hell's Kitchen.

Aside: social video distribution to niche audiences

So you're trying to reach dads who are considering booking a trip to a safari park. You'd better get your ad onto CompareTheSafariPark.com then, hadn't you? That way, you can reach all those head-scratching dads and sit back as they forward your film onto all the other dads embarked on that research task, right?

No. No. And no.

People engaged on the sort of task-orientated, goal-driven sites where you think you want contextual placement, aren't super-interested in being side-tracked into watching videos. Even if you could reach this micro audience effectively by media buying, it'd be way too small to jumpstart a social phenomenon. And in any case, even if the safari-park-considering dad happens to love the film and is desperate to send it on, how the hell is he any more effective at sending it to other safari-park-considering dads, than all the kids, girlfriends, wives, colleagues and grandparents out there who know what those dads are (supposed to be) doing?

Caterer.com's Little Gordon shows how to do this right. With successful social video campaigns, targeting needs to be baked in at the content creation stage, not tacked on during the media planning process. That way, every opportunity that relies on user invitation, choice, engagement and advocacy will increase the probability of an impact being an impact against the brand's target group.

This is especially true with the cost-per-engagement model of advertising advocated by Unruly. Wherever the film is placed, the only people watching it are those who have chosen to click play based on the still image in the player and the surrounding text. Just as with search marketing, the media buy itself makes use of self-selection to ensure effective targeting and minimize wastage. And this is taken further still when the viewer is deciding who to send the clip onto. Relevance to the recipient is one of the key factors in pass-on, significant enough, in fact, that we identify it as a social trigger when evaluating digital content. So as long as the content is sufficiently relevant to its intended audience, it's quite possible to rely on a diverse and brand-irrelevant audience to get it there. 

Agency credits

• Creative & Planning: Rebel Virals
• Social Video distribution: Unruly Media