Besides just being well done, I think it does a good job selling the book. Makes promises that you need to read the book to get.

There are so many valuable opinions in this thread – great to see such active debate on the subject. Four things stand out for me based on the above:

1. The original article/post approached the critique from the specific angle of sales of Going West, which is unfortunate, as I don’t think that is what the advertisement actually set out to achieve. The NZ Book Council encourages NZ people to read books, and also to promote the cultural value of NZ writers. Considering the average budget of an arts council, the target market and advertising spend would have been focused on NZ people (when was the last time a Book Council had a world wide advertising budget?) Hence I don’t think international sales performance really gets to the heart of the matter.

2. That said, as Jonathan (and most others) thought it was an ad to sell a book, the intended message didn’t seem to come through anyway. That to me was very strange.

3. However, PR (both social media and traditional) has to be a measure here. I’m thinking of all the thousands of book trailers we’re not talking about right now. There are over 15,000 google results for “going west nz book council”, thousands of tweets on twitter, and Google Insights reports significant increases in worldwide search volume for both “maurice gee” and “nz book council” around the release of the trailer. Many of these searches I would presume would result in the campaign objective “ie an interest in NZ books/writers” being met – as the subject is talked about alongside the video. Certainly has raised at least the awareness of Maurice Gee as a writer. I know I found out it was intended to lift awareness of NZ writers by reading the detail in a blog post – the call to action was there, just not as direct as you would normally expect. Previous to seeing the video and reading the blog post, I thought Maurice Gee was an Australian writer (most Australians tend to think NZ overachievers are actually Australians), so hey the ambiguous call to action (or message) worked on me.

4. I think an interesting question is whether NZ Book Council ever actually designed this as an online viral campaign. The video was placed online in their name, but the details below the youtube video suggest the upload was by an agency as the details below it are really just industry details (ie which agency made it). There are no prompts to visit the NZ council website, no call to action included at the end of the video, no new videos or discussion has been instigated on the channel by NZ council since the initial upload around the topic, their twitter page only has 196 tweets and 276 followers (suggesting it was only created a few months ago). They are not exactly primed for an innovative online campaign such as what we are talking about.

So you either lambast NZ Council for the failings of their online campaign, or entertain the possibility that there is no online campaign (i would say this played heavily on NZ television) – hence all of this publicity is a bonus.

Regardless of which way you want to take it, the next time NZ Book Council produce something awesome online (whether intentional or not), it would be a good idea to support it with a sound social media strategy and the very basic marketing aspects (ie a call to action and some kind of follow up). This is a great video, and at the very least all it really needed was a URL.

2) Both visuals and dialogue should support your desired message, whether the message is raising brand awareness or promoting some “good thing” about a company. The animation did a great job of capturing attention but did little to promote the message, which I’m guessing was “books excite the imagination”. The voice-over (a dramatic reading) was a neat idea, but there was no message attached. In fact, by going for drama in both visuals and audio, by not leaving space for audio and video to each have a turn at lead the ad became “cluttered”. The visuals were more compelling to me, so I (and a lot of people) tuned the audio out.

As a book promotion tool, this ad fails–the message wasn’t delivered. As a video, this piece also fails–there’s too much going on. In the end, the successful message (and the reason I think this video went viral) was, “paper cutouts are cool”.

Must be that I’m too old (over 40) — I think the concept of book trailers are oxymoronic. It’s an artsy-fartsy “movie”. What does it have to do with the experience of / process of reading?

I read at least a book a week — if someone I trust tells me that a book is good, or if I see a video of the author reading from their book or talking about their book, that might drive me to read it.

Some popular book video that tells me nothing about the book? Naaah.

KA meeting schedule available online.