From ocregister.com
Though Disney officials say there have probably been thousands of real wedding proposals at Disneyland, this one was acted out by members of Disneyland’s musical and parade performing cast.
“The video was very popular,” said Disney spokeswoman Suzi Brown. “We thought a ’spontaneous musical’ would be a fun way to get the message out about celebrating at Disneyland Resort while highlighting our summer offerings. The response has been great. People love it.”
The idea was to get the video — basically an extended commercial for Disneyland — on the Web through the DisneyParks YouTube channel and have it travel virally around the Internet through re-posting on other YouTube users’ channels, social networking sites, e-mail and social link-sharing sites like digg.
So far, it seems to be working: posted last month on the DisneyParks YouTube channel, it’s gotten more than 700,000 views; re-posted on another user’s site, it has well over 100,000 views. The video has more than 2,500 “diggs,” as in the number of times users recommended the video on the digg site.
As of this post, the video views will shoot up even more — we linked to it, so it must be working, right?
The trouble is, all those views and recommendations don’t necessarily translate to people visiting the park.
“You really have to approach viral marketing as an experiment,” said Greg Witt, the creative director for Premise Immersive Marketing. “You can do really cool viral stuff for 5 or 10K. The barriers to entry are low… but this is an emerging medium and it’s moving at light speed. Nobody has a metric on it.”
In other words, you can tell viewers watched your video 700,000 times, and that’s it. It’s not like putting an ad in the newspaper for your restaurant and the day it runs you have 50 extra customers in your restaurant.
“The value of viral marketing is when something really seems authentic and has some entertainment value to it,” Witt said. “When people want to share it and it doesn’t seem so corporate.”
But wait a minute — Disney’s wedding proposal video doesn’t say specifically that it’s staged, though Disney posted it on the company’s own channel. Is that deceitful?
“It’s more stealthy,” Witt said. “That’s OK if there’s a good sarcastic and snarkiness to it. The stuff that is really, really fabricated… It’s the same as making a really bad TV commercial.
“If you can come with an emotional response and wrap your brand around that, young people are big supporters of that and they don’t mind being marketed to like that.”
The proposal video is Disney’s second foray into viral video marketing — the first was posted in January to promote Disney’s “Celebrate!” promotion, the lynchpin of which is a deal that lets guests into the park free on their birthdays.