Stride Gum Partners With Semi-Famous Internet Dancer

As Attention Shoppers! has often pointed out, it is difficult to create, from scratch, an online experience that attracts significant numbers of eyeballs. At least without spending lots of cash on an online ad campaign. Advertising to drive people to your advertising, if you will.

 

It makes much more sense to go to where the eyeballs are hanging out. And instead of always creating your own branded content from scratch, it also seems to make sense to associate your brand with existing, already popular content. This is, of course, standard procedure for other channels, but it’s something that is still developing with online marketing.

 

Here is a good example of a CPG brand that is doing just that. Stride Gum is sponsoring the latest around-the-world trip of dancing fool Matt Harding (read what Ad Age had to say about it here). Mr. Harding, who claims he has not had a job since Stride signed him up to be a dancing pitch man, has achieved a measure of internet fame (over five million YouTube visits) by being filmed dancing at recognizable landmarks around the world.

 

The result is a very entertaining montage, that has progressively gotten even more fun to watch as people around the world have joined in the dancing.

 

The relationship with Stride Gum is tenuous at best (Stride Gum lasts a ridiculously long time, as do Mr. Hardings trips and dancing) but, in this case it doesn’t really seem to matter. Increasingly, it will be the job of ad agencies to find this content and offer it up to their clients. If they don’t, there will be plenty of PR firms, Media Planning and buying agencies and Production companies that will be perfectly willing to do it instead–and they already are.