When Blip.tv and Happy Little Guillotine Films partnered up with 7-Eleven to create a web-based reality series they could not have anticipated the amazing response the show would receive. The series, which followed two teams in a convenience store product-inspired race across the country, received nearly 2 million views, an impressive following on Twitter, a multitude of video shares and, overall, achieved more than they could have ever expected. I had the opportunity to speak with Evan Gotlib, VP Advertising Sales at Blip.tv, and Yuri Baranovsky from HLG Films to find out a little bit more about the success of the 7-Eleven Road Rally. Find out what they had to say after the jump.
Before getting into the specifics of the campaigns success, I wanted to find out more about how Blip.tv and HLG Films got involved in the series. 7-Eleven’s ad agency sent out RFPs (requests for proposal) to a number of companies, including Blip.tv. Baranovsky told me, “They wanted distribution and advertising, which is Blip’s gig, but they also wanted the production side of it. So, Blip put together the distribution side of the pitch, we put together the production side of the pitch, and, amazingly, we got it.”
Although both Blip.tv and Happy Little Guillotine both have a lot of experience in the web series biz, Road Trip Rally was unlike anything either of them had ever done before. Baranovsky told me, “The fact is I’ve never heard of anyone shooting, editing and releasing episodes every day for three weeks for any project – so there wasn’t much to go off of, it was something completely new and different and we had to create it for ourselves. And while we slept very little, it thankfully worked out better than all of us could’ve hoped.”
Lucky for Blip and HLG, 7-Eleven left the production and creation of the show pretty open. On his blog, Baranovsky writes, “When we got the gig, it was our intent to not make the same awful type of reality series’ that are prevalent nowadays. Luckily, we had the extreme fortune of working with 7-Eleven and their ad agency, TracyLocke – both of which understood that the Internet does not necessarily function like traditional media and that funny, quirky comedy sells in this space like some kind of delicious, quirky hotcake. They gave us almost full creative power to do everything from having our host, Drew give them each a cardboard cutout of himself to having Mr. Peanut destroy their picnic and steal their stuff.” Evan Gotlib also told me that 7-Eleven was great to work with as they are “very forward thinking marketers” and were willing to go where no web series had gone before.
Gotlib shared some statistics about the success of the Road Trip Rally with me. He told me that the series sustained around 1.8 million views, over 32,000 viewers shared a video and the series accrued a total of more than 2,000 Twitter followers. Most impressive, however, is the fact that visitors spent an average of about 7 minutes on the Road Trip Rally website, meaning that 7-Eleven and Blip.tv really succeeded in their mission of engaging consumers online.
When I spoke with him, Gotlib emphasized the fact that the Web is driving consumer engagement in a way that television never could, and 7-Eleven’s series is testament to that. When television viewers see a 7-Eleven commercial during a break from their favorite programming they are engaged for all of thirty seconds (if they aren’t in the kitchen grabbing a sandwich) and then they move on with their lives. The 7-Eleven Road Trip Rally succeeded in getting viewers to watch, share videos with their friends, interact with the teams on Twitter and come back to see more. That, my friends, is the future of advertising.
Blip.tv has put together a nice case study about the web series and its success. Check it out below and let us know what you think. Did you watch Road Trip Rally? Do you think we will be seeing more branded web series like this taking off in the future?
