FLIRTing with the Crowds

Finnish TV channel Nelonen allows people to submit their own inserts for ad breaks between the shows in their christmas campaign. The best inserts are shown on TV, as could be expected. Sounds very neat indeed but in my opinion, the execution falls short of the promise. I’ll try to briefly analyze the competition through my FLIRT model:

• Focus: giving your viewers a say in shaping your channels christmas look is a nice focus for a tv channel. However, they have been quite restrictive in focusing the effort since there’s no public gallery, no possibility to discuss or rate the input, no control whatsoever given to the customer to affect the outcome of the competition or even view the proceeds in real time. The result is a black hole that sucks your input but gives out nothing. There’s no community, nor a sign of any kind of human activity on the site.
• Language: the social object seems to be christmas, which I think is a bit broad to resonate effectively amongst the crowds. A bit narrower focus in this part could’ve stirred a bit more creativity. For example, Nelonen’s tagline is “something totally different”, but here you can only express your self through pretty typical xmas characters. It would’ve been nice to focus on the “something totally different” tagline also with this little tool and allow a bit more creativity & craziness.
• Incentives: the main incentive for these kinds of competitions has unfortunately been left unused; that is of course exposure on Nelonen’s site for each and every one of the works. There’s no explicit rewards either, so the only incentive that remains is the possibility to be among the top artists and getting your insert shown on TV. This of course happens to only a few of total contestants.
• Rules: as there’s no public gallery and no community, there’s really no need for extensive rules. Explicit rules are constrained to three signs showing you what to do (add element/move element/rotate element).
• Tools: This is probably one of the main pitfalls here. They’re talking about TV inserts here, which are usually video/moving image, but instead what we’re allowed to do is a static poster. In addition, you can only pick one character/element per category (six categories with a few different characters/elements each). That really doesn’t allow for too much self expression per poster. The only truly flexible element is the speech bubble to which you can write your own xmas greetings. The absence of the public gallery however handicaps this feature, as people are not allowed to use the tool as a means to publish xmas greetings to their friends (and everyone else). This possibility would have added an effective viral effect to the service as people would have been sending links to the service like service.

That’s my take. I’m not going to predict whether or not they will get a great response with this or not. They do anyway have a lot of exposure for the competition between the shows so it might try people to try it (it did so with me). I’m saying they’ve left out a lot of key elements to make this kind of competition work. I’m still going to check out Nelonen on xmas eve to see what kind of output this competition produces.