The Best Trade Ad. Ever.
25th July 2008
By Chris Rand
You’ve got to hand it to lab equipment specialist Eppendorf, the It’s Called epMotion campaign is a triumph. (You’ll need your speakers on).
I really couldn’t guess what it cost them, but as B2Blog points out, it might only be the equivalent of a page ad in a lab equipment magazine for a few months. And in return, Eppendorf will be getting massive numbers of links from around the internet (like this), as well as loads of “viral” traffic as customers in that market pass the link around amongst themselves. The result will surely be worth far, far more than a page ad in a lab equipment magazine for a few months.
The company has missed a few tricks: it doesn’t seem to have given the page a simple URL which people can quote and remember, and (worst of all) it’s failed to offer an obvious link to the page from the company’s home page (to account for the potential visitors who are just told “have you seen that thing on the Eppendorf site?”). But in general, I can only applaud the initiative.
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Holger Eggert wrote on 25 July 2008:
Dear Chris,
Thanks a lot for the nice words: “The Best Trade Ad. Ever.” sounds really good. In fact it is an exciting success for us. We were not only mentioned in blogs and news forums, we even had articles in nature.com and national geographic.com. However most importantly: walking through the floors of scientific institutes you hear the song playing. So we have rached our target group extremely well, and they understood the message of automated pipetting.
Let me make two comments on your post:
* The video page has a simple address http://www.epMotion.com/video, however it is as well reachable through the more “complicated” adress you mentioned. And this address has spread virally. If you choose to do something viral, there are some elements you cannot influence and the address chosen to forward seemed to be one.
* On the videopage (below the video on the left) is a section: “What’s it all about” and links to the epMotion.com webpage. You seem to have missed it. But I am not worried as the traffic on our product page has increased dramatically!
Thanks again and let’s see - there might be more to come.
Holger
Chris wrote on 25 July 2008:
Hi Holger
My criticisms shouldn’t be elevated above the “relatively trivial” level compared to the impact of the idea as a whole. My comment about the missing link from the company’s home page referred to there not being a link from http://www.eppendorf.com itself, which seems to be a missed opportunity.
Chris
Laboratorytalk Blog » Blog Archive » Eppendorf vs Bio-Rad in the battle of the video wrote on 25 July 2008:
[...] now I learn of a contender to the crown: Eppendorf has issued its riposte to Bio-Rad with It’s Called [...]
George Rodrigues wrote on 25 July 2008:
This video is definately getting forwarded to anyone in the business. Our company is in the business of making systems that calibrate pipetting machines such as the epMotion.
As July 11th, our lab manager reported that five differnet external contacts had forwarded the link to her. Viral indeed!