ChasNote

Nobody does product placement better than 30 Rock. Instead of taking the money and quietly hiding the product on set, 30 Rock leans in — hard. In the latest episode, Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy is required by circumstances to video conference, and the show’s writers take it over the top by working in lines that make Jack sound like he’s reading from the Cisco TelePresence brochure.

The lost opportunity (for Cisco and for NBC) is that the product-placement scene is locked up at Hulu. You can watch it there by scrolling through the episode, but it would reach many more eyeballs if fans could excerpt the clip and set free on YouTube.

I love these embed-able ad units that feature longer-form video programming (here’s Dell’s), this one from a section of Cisco’s Welcome to the Human Network site that FM is helping them with:

Building off the success of last fall’s seed campaign, where FM business and technology authors supplied definitions of the human network for ads on their own sites, Cisco’s latest creative units allow for readers to submit their own definitions within the banners themselves. Here are samples.

Last month’s “Welcome to the Human Network” campaign by Cisco continues to illustrate the impact of “author driven” or “conversational marketing” beyond the surface metrics of impressions and click-through rates. Sure, by letting authors lend their names and personal definitions to Cisco ads on their own sites, Cisco’s ads experienced better-than-average click through rates.

But more than that, the campaign introduced a new phrase — “the human network” — to the business / IT lexicon. As proof, the term has made its way to Wikipedia as an entry, with Cisco getting credit for popularizing the phrase. The campaign’s landing page, because it’s a collection of insights and definitions from leading business and tech thought leaders rather than marketing-speak from Cisco, attracted links from sites across the web. Now, as a result, a Google search for “human network” returns the campaign’s landing page in the #2 position — ahead of Cisco’s own site.

I forget which coach for the Italian national soccer team coined the phrase “total football” for a style of play in which every player played like he was actively, offensively involved in every play, wherever he was on the field; every player firing on all pistons, all the time. This kind of ad campaign ought to be called “total marketing.”

I don’t know what kind of value to put on this (is it $100,000s or $1,000,000s?), but Cisco’s Human Network campaign has apparently entered the popular discourse: It’s now an entry on Wikipedia.

A few weeks ago Cisco’s agency, Neo@Ogilvy, asked FM to help create buzz heading into a new corporate brand campaign. Cisco’s upcoming campaign is built around the tagline, “Welcome to the Human Network.” And, in the spirit of “we just make the routers, it’s all of you who do the really cool stuff on top of those routers,” they decided to let their customers shape the meaning of that tagline.

Since the “human network” isn’t yet a well-defined phrase, they enlisted thought leaders to volunteer their own definitions, without guidance from Cisco or Ogilvy. Contributors included a handful of FM authors, such as Boing Boing’s David Pescovitz, 43Folders’s Merlin Mann, Metafilter’s Matt Haughey, GigaOM’s Om Malik, Wi-Fi Networking News’s Glenn Fleishman, Newsvine’s Mike Davidson, XYZ Computing’s Sal Cangeloso, TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington, Searchblog’s John Battelle and Make’s Phil Torrone. These authors penned their thoughts and plugged them into Cisco ads on their own sites. The ads then invite readers to visit a Cisco landing page that hosts definitions from other thought leaders and gives them an opportunity to vote for a favorite. If they don’t see a definition that gets it right, they can also click to the “human network” page at Wikia (a collection of freely-hosted wiki communities built on the same software as Wikipedia) to edit the definition there.

Truly open source advertising!

Just like the first version of an open source software app, however, we didn’t get it exactly right from the get-go. The initial thinking was, put up a definition of the “human network” on Wikipedia, and drive customers there to hone it and improve it. But as we explained the idea to the thought leaders (in order for them to write their definitions and create their own ads) several raised red flags, namely the community rules at Wikipedia that prohibit use of the site for commercial purposes. How lame would it be for us to launch a campaign around a page on Wikipedia that disappeared — evicted by the human network of Wikipedians! — before we drove the first person there to make edits?! So we reached out to Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia founder) and Gil Penchina (Wikia CEO) and asked them how to do this right. By the end of the conversation, they convinced us to host the page at Wikia instead of Wikipedia, and Jimmy himself offered to post the seed definition.

Within the first 48 hours, 600 people had voted. And since the campaign empowered website authors to participate, build co-branded ads for their own sites and even contribute strategic input on the campaign overall, a few of the authors even plugged the campaign in editorial posts. Here’s Battelle’s at Searchblog.