Doin’ the Math on Dooce’s Wii Giveaway
July 24, 2008 by Colleen Coplick
Filed under Social Media
Oh, to have the traffic Dooce generates. I was reading her the other day and saw she was giving away five Nintendo Wiis along with five Wii Fits. Kind of a cool idea, and very cool for a blogger to have the kind of power to generate enough interest to be able to give away five systems.
I saw the pictures of the Wii Fit party Nintendo threw a Wii Fit party at Heather’s house. It made me wish I’d been there.
Heather is really good about being uber-transparent on her site. She blogged about her agreement with Nintendo and explained that she wasn’t being paid to promote the company, the Wii or the Wii Fit.
Mack Collier from the Viral Garden did the math on Dooce’s giveaway and the ROI for Nintendo. I was stunned. Check out Mack’s math here:
Heather received a staggering 42,232 comments for her post offering the five Nintedo systems to random commentors. Every Wii set costs Nintendo roughly $160.00. That means those five Wiis that Nintendo gave away, cost the company about $800.00. Add in 5 Wii Fits (which retail for around $80), and the likely cost to Nintendo for this promotion (5 Wiis plus 5 Wii Fits), is approximately $1,000.00.
Based on this data, Nintendo makes $90.00 per Wii system it sells. At that rate, Nintendo would have to sell only 11 Wiis from this promotion, to break even.
For reference, that’s 0.025% of the comments. So if 11 out of the 42,232 comments resulted in sales, Nintendo broke even.
If just 1% of the 42,232 comments translated into sales, then the ROI for this promotion is 3,700%.
Eleven. Nintendo would have to sell 11 systems just to break even from a promotion that reached more than 42,000 people. This doesn’t count any of the additional posts that this promotion reached, the number of blogs who linked to Dooce’s post about the Wii, and all of the marketing and social media blogs who are posting about this rather massive success.
Now, granted, Dooce has killer traffic stats to begin with, and marketers are beating down her door. Not every company will have access to the kind of traffic Dooce commands, and not every marketer will be able to woo someone like Dooce, but, scale this back a bit.
Start talking to a blogger who has good traffic, even if it’s not Dooce levels. Your ROI with a well trafficked blog can be pretty damn good as well, even if you need to sell more than eleven units in order to break even.
wow.
Seriously – as a marketer, you’ve got to love those numbers.
As a blogger, don’t we all aspire to them? :)
But personally? I’d never want to have to go thru some of the things Heather has survived to get there!
One word: Wow!
There’s no question that Nintendo enjoyed huge ROI on that campaign, but Mack’s math looks significantly wrong. He entirely ignores the ’soft costs’ of landing the promotion with Heather. I’ll leave a comment over on his site outlining what those might be.
@geekmommy – i completely agree. Heather’s gone through hell and back to get to where she is. I just admire her for having gotten there.
@Darren I agree 200% with you and I should have included a note saying as such. I just don’t have a clue how many people would have worked on the nintendo side to get to heather or how long this took to put into place. I am still of the mind that campaigns like this, to this degree, on smaller blogs builds relationships with bloggers for when they reach that higher pinnacle. Soft costs are a tricky thing to figure out. Mind leaving a comment and letting me know when you’ve got your soft cost comment up on Mack’s site? I’m very intrigued.
It’s a seriously back-of-the-envelope calculation, but I guessed that they could have easily run to $20K. See Mack’s site for details.