Despite its wartime beginnings and apparently cosy setting (the fictional town of Ambridge in the fictional Midlands county of Borsetshire) The Archers is not afraid to tackle modern issues. Inter-faith marriage, homosexuality, kidnappings and industrial espionage have all been featured in the serial, which has a tradition of echoing events in the real world.

The latest example of this is young Tom Archer, the entrepreneurial prodigal son of the Archer clan. Tasked with launching a new brand of sausages after an E-Coli food poisoning scandal which has all but destroyed the family business, Tom has decided to exploit the potential of social media – specifically, video.

Tom’s idea is to promote the health and wellbeing of his pigs to his consumers by training the animals to play football, capturing it on video, and launching it onto the internet. Tom is convinced that his unique brand of swine soccer will create significant buzz around his new Borchester Sausages brand. His marketing plan rests on the idea that shoppers will rush to supermarkets to buy sausages made from pigs they have just watched frolic around on the internet before they got minced.

Tom has obviously been hanging around some new media types in the trendier parts of nearby Felpersham.

But will his strategy work?

After uploading his video late last week, the most recent episode of The Archers heard Tom’s farmhand Jazza (Scottish, the Archers is nothing if not multi-cultural) writing off the pig football videos as a waste of time. “Even in Ambridge the agenda’s moved on” lectured Jazza.

Apart from it being glaringly obvious that Jazza needs to get out of farming and into social media consultancy immediately, Tom’s lack of success is down to his lack of video strategy.

Making entertaining content and simply catapulting it online is no longer an option in a world where an estimated 48 hours of video is uploaded every minute. That’s a lot of cat videos – Swine Soccer  wouldn’t stand a chance.

Tom’s video project features few links to the new Borchester Sausage brand, apart from on the video itself. None of his packaging references the sporty porkers matches, and he has spent weeks crafting what appears to be a single piece of video content. He launched the video too early, and without strategic content partners – next week is the charmingly named ‘British Sausage Week’ in Ambridge, surely the organisers would have loved some entertaining sausage related content?

To summarise, Tom Archer’s video project has failed because he tried to make a viral video – not a video strategy. Sadly, the services of a company like GoViral are probably beyond Tom’s budget so he will just have to hope that the Borchester Sausage soccer pigs catch the imagination of enough viewers online.

As an aside, it turns out that pig football is more prevalent than you might think. A quick search on the web provides so many instances of the sport that you have to wonder why nobody at Ginsters has spotted a sponsorship opportunity. 

 

Now if Tom Archer had access to Cream, he would have discovered a number of successful video based marketing strategies to help him, such as:

Twitter live reply | KLM, Netherlands

Uncontrolled women | Dove, Argentina

Make IT happen | HP & Intel, Asia Pacific

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