Farming in the media - part three

In the third part of our "Farming in the media" series, we examine the concept of viral videos to further highlight the rigours of farming.

The concept of a viral video became named in 2009, although these forms of videos that were shared between friends and work colleagues started in around 1995, do you remember the Dancing Baby videos? The idea of the video is to gain an immediate hit with the viewer and less focus on the advertiser, so that the video gets passed like a 'virus'.

In 2009, Samsung, launched their range of smart LED technology with a YouTube clip of sheep on a Welsh hillside creating assorted works of art. The low tech filming worked with the audience and the video gained an audience of 4 million just after one week. It had risen to over 200,000 views. With three or four videos of varying lengths, one version of Samsung's glowing sheep can be viewed below:

 In 2011, the producers of Yeo Valley produced an advert that spanned both the viral video community and entered into the charts on iTunes, a music site from Apple computers. The ad agency BBH (Bartle Bogel and Hegarty) released the advert within an advert break of the X-Factor. The advert included young people of the X-Factor demographic, singing (also a part of the X-Factor show) as well as being shot on location in Somerset whilst including agricultural, conservation and environmental keywords were inserted within the rap.

The Yeo Valley viral video, under the guidance of BBH, goes further as it links further sites of social networking as the blog from Tamsin Fox Davies explains. The initial video had the ingredients of the viral video, as listed by Tamsin Fox Davies, being catchy, cool, funny, good production values, informative, relevant and targeted to the audience. It wants you to find out more and it even shows you where to get it. So how did the Yeo Valley extend its social network experience, I urge you to the look at the aforementioned blog, but in summary - BBH created a YouTube spoof (entitled Yeo Tube) site with more Yeo Valley videos, a Facebook page with a singing competition (extending the X-Factor targeting), a Twitter account, an iTunes download of the original song and finally an official website.

The blog by Real Business gets down to the brass tacks of the campaign by asking what was the return on the investment of the advert. The details, below were written on the 31st of March 2011, showed that "brand awareness had increased by 71%" and approximately "half a million more households in the UK brought our products in the 12 weeks to December 2010" and Yeo Valley's  retail value increased by "14.9% year on year outperforming the rest of the yoghurt market by more than 2.5 times". 

So should advertisers create more country-friendly to create a better informed idea of what the countryside is and does? Do these two examples of viral videos that advertise both food and non food products show a good view of the country? Do you know of any similar campaigns that farming and rural enterprises have used social networks in their advertising campaigns? I await your thoughts...

South East Vineyards Association Trip Part Three

Continuing the further exploits of the South East Vineyards Association Trip and one member of SEVA whose trip was part sponsored by the International Farmlink, we learn a bit about champagne corks.

This morning's first visit on the SEVA Champagne trip was to Oller, a manufacturer of Champagne corks in Reims. I say manufacturer, but they actually accept the prefabricated pieces (discs and crumbles) from their factory in Spain (where the cork forests are) and stick them together in Reims. This sounds easy, but actually it is a detailed process with many, many steps and quality measures and checks in place. Two discs form the bottom of the cork and the composite layer above is used since it is cheaper. Quite an interesting trip, and refreshing there was no accompanying glass of Champagne!

For the readers of this blog who are from France or have a smattering of French, I think there is an interesting video of some corks and an idea of investment in Reims on YouTube.

The afternoon's visit saw us at Nicolas Feuillatte (the website has links to English, French, German, Italian and Japanese sites), the huge cooperative. The visit was characterised by the wow-factor. Ohhh, what huge tanks you have. Ahhh, what huge and efficient machines you have. Yiiikes, how many bottles per year was that?

In fact Moet's production is twice as big, though Feuillate is the biggest seller in France, showing just how much Moet is marketed for export.

I'm not sure how much I really got from the trip. It was interesting that they don't use pectolytic enzymes to speed settling ("no time to add them", the man said, or somesuch as we whizzed around with our necks craning up at the huge tanks or down over the balcony to watch robots wrangling pallets full of bottles into shape).

Then there was the tasting. I'll be frank it left me a little cold. Perhaps the wines were a little sweeter than my normal taste. Some others in the group left the shop with Champagne in fancy packaging, but I did not.

More next week.
Travel bursaries are available to contribute to the cost of study trips to help your business. If you are interested, please contact the International Farmlink.