Target's Black Friday Spots Hit Web Paydirt

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Target came out swinging with its Black Friday effort this year. For the second year, it's tapped comedian Maria Bamford, who has ties to Target 's hometown of Minneapolis. Agency Wieden & Kennedy produced 10 15- and 30-second spots to promote the discounter's two-day sale, and they ran between Nov. 17 and Nov. 27. Those TV spots and other original clips --20 in all-- also worked pretty well on the web, and the campaign landed on the Viral Chart last week at No. 2. Ms. Bamford, as an overly passionate, hyped-up holiday shopper, prepares in Rocky-esque fashion for the holidays. She wraps gifts while consulting a stop watch, does bicep curls with a shopping basket and sprints down Target 's aisles. In one spot she lays in bed covered in alarm clocks, intent on not sleeping in and missing Target 's 4 a.m. opening. Depending on your point of view, the spots are either incredibly annoying or completely hilarious. And that's the point. In an interview with Ad Age this fall, Michael Francis, Target 's chief marketing officer, admitted that the spots could be polarizing. A year ago, they were heavier on dialogue and story line. This year, Mr. Francis says Target let Ms. Bamford "revel in the character of the passionate holiday shopper. ... It's fun exaggerating those manic shopper tendencies." That strategy appears to be working, in part due to the proliferation of derivative spoofs. One of the more popular videos shows a woman bench pressing her baby and pushing a stroller through a Target parking lot while pulling a man in a shopping cart. No. 1 on the chart this week is a Google campaign with Hyundai, which is a testament to the promotional power of YouTube. The spot took residence on the YouTube home page last week, where it drew 1.2 million of its more than 2.3 million views. *The Visible Measures Top 10 Viral Video Ad Campaigns Chart focuses on brand-driven viral video ads that appear on online-video-sharing destinations. Each campaign is measured on a True Reach basis, which includes viewership of both brand-syndicated video clips and viewer-driven social video placements. The data are compiled using the Visible Measures Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing repository of analytic data on more than 100 million internet videos across more than 150 video-sharing destinations. Note: This analysis does not include Visible Measures' paid-placement (i.e., overlays, pre-/mid-/post-roll) performance data or video views on private sites. This chart does not include movie trailers, video-game campaigns, TV show or media network promotions, or public service announcements. View-count results are incremental by week. **Indicates percent change in views compared with the same period the week before. To notify Visible Measures of an upcoming video ad campaign, or for an end-to-end assessment of your campaign's overall performance, please contact Visible Measures directly.

Target's Black Friday Spots Hit Web Paydirt

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