And I love how Chili’s is playing along.  On their Facebook page they have a response to Correll’s “decision” ala the same way the owner of the Cavs wrote his open letter to LeBron.

Thanks to @khollin for showing me this.

Since I didn’t even have this blog back then, I thought I’d share it with you guys.  It cracks me up every time.

That’s right, its extremely tough to keep up with all the new things happening in the world of digital technology.  Heck, just look at all the cool stuff coming out of CES (good places to start are here and here).  And its not enough just to read about the new stuff.  To really understand it, you have to jump in.  There’s really no other way.

Right now I’m several months in to testing out the geo-location, checkin-style mobile apps.  Specifically, Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl and Loopt (I’ve stopping using Loopt because it really didn’t compare with the others).  And it took a little while but I am starting to “get” what is so appealing about telling your friends where you are eating, drinking, etc.  And FYI I’m really digging Whrrl so far…

Back to the point.  I recently tried Farmville.  Have you seen the stats on Farmville?  Over 70 million people are playing Farmville. 70 MILLION!

However, I gave it a go for a few months and you know what?  It got me.  And look, I’m no farmer.  I wasn’t even exactly sure what the difference between “harvesting” and “plowing” and “seeding”.  Seriously.  But I became addicted to keeping my farm going.  And now I understand more about what makes for an addictive, successful game on Facebook.  And that knowledge is invaluable as I work with clients on their digital marketing goals for 2010.

Oh, and you can just try something for a while until you “get it”, and then quit.  I had to quit Farmville so that it didn’t become DivorceVille…oh, and you can check out my farm at this point in time ;)

Want to hear about their products?  They pull up their Wikipedia listing.

Interested in pics, or video?  Where better to look than Flickr and YouTube.

Want to hear about the Skittles “chatter” on the web?  Twitter’s search results will do just fine.

Connect with other Skittles fans and make new friends?  Yep, you guessed it, takes you to Facebook.

It’s a very radical approach to being comfortable enough to allow the public to *officially* control your brand in the digital space.  Are they censoring it?  Nope, check out the Tweet I made to test that, looks like they are letting anything go, and good for them!

I’d love to know what YOU think about this.  Is it marketing genius at work, or a way of being extremely frugal with their marketing budget (or maybe a little of both)?

Who is this ‘we’ I’m talking about?  Hm, well, it’s not my wife, she hasn’t heard of it.  It certainly wasn’t my dentist when I asked him.  Nor the various family members I asked over the holiday breaks.

I suppose ‘we’ in this sense is agency folk.  Well, no worries if only that tiny sliver of people have heard of the campaign.  It was HUGELY successful.  Major ROI on that campaign.  Sold a lot of hamburgers…right?

Just look at this award submission page that Crispin put up.  This thing was a HUGE success!  Over 450 million hits to the website!  More than 7,000,000 broadcast impressions!  And the site says, “a significant increase in chicken sales directly linked to the success of the site”.  Huh?  No gaudy numbers of how much sales increased?

Now, granted, I’m not the first to question the real success of this campaign.  But I’m contending that this campaign has actually hurt the progression of social media and viral marketing and it’s taken us almost four years to overcome it since its inception in April of ‘04.

Here’s what happened.  Back when this campaign came out, the world wasn’t sure what social marketing, viral video, or any of this ‘emerging channel’ stuff was all about.  So this campaign came out and blew everyone away, myself included.  The campaign was amazingly creative and honestly, it was cool as hell.  A dude in a chicken costume that would do whatever you told him to via a website?  Brilliant.

But it was never measured against direct sales.  It was measured against hype, which predominantly was us talking to ourselves (the ‘we’ I spoke of earlier).

Our industry has only just now started to understand that the true power of digital marketing is when it intertwines effectively with direct marketing – i.e. it actually drives sales and is measured accordingly.  Our own chairman, Stan Rapp, recently moderated a panel at Advertising Week entitled, “What You Need to Know About Direct + Digital = EXPONENTIAL GROWTH“.  Why these two areas of marketing have largely worked independently of each other for so long is amazing to me.

So for the past four years, marketers have tried to emulate what the subservient chicken accomplished.  Impressions.  Check.  Industry praise.  Check.  ‘Viralability’.  Check.  Sales?  Not hardly.

And agencies, always far too focused on keeping up with the other agencies, have been pushing these types of campaigns harder than the TV networks have been pushing reality TV ever since the first Survivor and Real Life’s came out (I mean seriously, have you heard of this new show, “Hole in a Wall“, where people have to…jump through a hole in a wall?  Seriously, you know there was a focus group that thought this show was a good idea.  I want to sell products to THOSE PEOPLE).  And hey, awards and recognition win new accounts, right?

How do we overcome this?  Well, I think its starting to happen naturally due to this economy (yes, this economy actually has some positive elements).  Because marketers are being forced to measure the direct success of their efforts and defend their budgets, they are working hard to tie direct sales to their campaigns.  This is a good thing (for agencies that understand the direct + digital mentality).

So we’re naturally on our way to overcoming this ’subservient effect’.

What else?  Well, how about all the award groups make direct sales a major, if not the only, criteria they analyze to determine the winners?  And marketers, how about forcing your agencies to give you direct KPI’s that tie to sales (key performance indicators) on all the campaigns they run?

In the end, its not Crispin’s fault that they put a four year hiatus on social marketing’s progress.  They just created a really cool, highly praised campaign back in 2004.  It’s all of our faults for never asking the real question, “So what did this actually do to sell burgers”?