Behind the Buzz - digital and interactive advertising and marketing

In the Motherhood

by Rachel on April 24th, 2007

Suave and Sprint, in conjunction with Microsoft and Fanlib, have pulled together a really interesting site to promote an online microseries with added extras, called In The Motherhood. It’s been promoted as the first series about mothers, for mothers and by mothers.

Launched on Ellen Degeneres show, the series stars Leah Remini. The site is soliciting scenarios and scenes that will then be judged and the winning stories included in the scripts. The first topic is Mothers’ Day and nearly 800 submissions were received. For each section, there are two winners, one from the judges and one voted by you. With the sheer number of stories sent in, it makes it difficult for the average site visitor to see them all, but the presentation of the scenes appears to be random, so each one should get an opportunity. They are going to produce 5 episodes, so there are 5 chances to enter a story over 5 weeks. Looking through them you can see that they are attracting mothers telling their stories as well as more professional writers; as with previous contests like this I’d be interested to see if any of the winners fall into the professional category.

But the site is so much more than that, touching on many of the web2.0 community elements as it can. The characters themselves have their own blogs, not on MySpace as if often seen but on Windows Live Spaces. This brings in the Sprint connection (the music list is what she listens to on her Sprint phone) as well as allowing people to comment. Pity the first and last entries are 10 days ago. One of the biggest issues with doing these blogs is actually maintaining them and keeping them up to date; there’s aslo a blurred line between the character and the actress, as you can see in the comments to Kim/Leah’s page.

The site has a section called ‘The Community’ (I wish they wouldn’t), where you can read stories about motherhood, connect with other mothers on the forum or play games. The forum itself is not that busy, considering the entries and votes that have been recorded, but that may change as some conversation seeders join. The games seem to be a lot busier, with over 1100 people recorded as playing the hearts game when I checked. The games are based on the MSN Messenger shared games, a good extension and co-option of that content.

Finally you can sign in and create a profile about you, and earn points for doing various activities. Not sure you get anything except a mention on the leader board for this, but does attempt to give people one more reason to come back.

So how are they promoting this? There’s the obvious tie in with Ellen; the first episode is going to be shown on the show for Mothers’ Day (on May 11). It’s linked from the Suave homepage and the MSN homepage, but not the Sprint page, althought he content will be available through the phones. There’s bound to be MSN advertising, but nothing has popped up for me yet, they should also be promotion on the various mom sites, such as Secret Squirrel. Suave are also promoting it through the Hot Moms Club (where’s the apostrophe?), and undoubtedly through the Suave and Sprint email list.

What do I think of it?. A good 360 plan from what I can see, hitting all the key touchpoints.

• Partnering with a major portal like MSN can reduce costs of building a site yourself (or at least some of the pain) and brings big advantage in traffic drivers, (although I find the site itself a little slow).
• A joint development with a content distribution partner such as Sprint (not acting as a telco) is also smart. The phone companies are trying to find good stuff to distribute to promote their data and content plans (walled gardened as they are) and developing their own stuff is a good way to go
• As entertaining content, it can go in far more places than traditional advertising, such as the tie in with Ellen, who, along with Leah, provides heavy PR value.
• It hits all the common UGC/social network hot points - create a profile page, vote, rate and submit your own content; connect with others through the forums or content comments Although some of this seems to be there for being there and not directly related to the key contest, it may have a longer lasting value, such as the points.
• online casual gaming is always a sweet spot; in this case they did not have to build anything new just tie into, in a very smart way, something that was already there. Again not directly related to the core concept, but definitely something that is popular with the audience.
• Although advertising supported, most of this campaign is content and connection driven (there’s no community, yet). I see this becoming more of the norm across many categories

PS: As a partner, I find Fanlib an interesting choice, promoting as it does fanfiction, an area that some content creators can get concerned about. And the site scarily reinforces the fact that Harry Potter fan fiction is one of the biggest out there, maybe because JK Rowling accepts it. Dave Weinberger has an interesting take on what the author should do for the next year - get out there and just interact with her myriads of fans.

Note: the agency I work for has Unilever as a client, although we have nothing to do with this.

Share This

Related Stories

Atalanta - the new Twenty Something woman

POSTED IN: Engaging the Customer, Integrated and Transmedia Marketing, User Generated Content