Will Harry date Sally is Yahoo and Nitro-Mobile’s campaign to promote Yahoo’s mobile service, One Search. It’s a video series “based around two central characters Harry and Sally, and how their prospects of finding love together might be enhanced by the most ubiquitous of modern technologies -the mobile phone.” It starts off with Harry, the DJ, meeting Sally, the barrista, as he goes to buy coffee. The whole thing launches tomorrow, Wed 27th

The idea pulls together a lot of strands and tactics that have been used recently.

1. It’s a branded episodic story, a romance cliffhanger to get the users interested
2. It’s a ‘choose your own adventure’ with viewers being encouraged to decide the next steps the hero should take
3. It’s product placement on the web, with the Yahoo mobile services being integral to the plot. The video introducing “viewers to the Yahoo! ‘onesearch’ product in a new and innovative way – and brings them into contact with the product on their mobile phones, just one click away from their phone’s mobile internet access and a search revolution!”
4. It’s user driven, with fans being asked to get involved in developing the story lines or even acting in the videos
5. It’s all on the mobile, from the press release it appears that only the first episode will be online, the rest available only to the phone, although you’ll need to go to the forum online to contribute.

What I think

This campaign is hitting a lot of the right buttons with me, with what could be good content, a lot of user interaction, multi-platform. I first saw the idea of fans/users being involved with creating a story with Where are the Joneses, where the sponsor was Ford. But this is a lot less subtle in the product placement and does not use a lot of the great stuff that surrounded that project, such as the Creative Commons licencing. In the forum, they were asked if the content could be remixed and answered

” sounds interesting, all creative projects will be viewed and considered. Will Harry date Sally has no defined path or structure, so define it”

Which still sounds like they want complete control of the project; there’s no indication I can see about who ‘owns’ the content or how it will be used . Overall, I think this is a great idea and I expect to see a lot more like it in the futire, I’m just concerned about the execution of it, having no T&Cs defined yet is a oversight.

The Pitch

*Since I first posted this, I have had an correspondence and an apology and the release in a format that’s easier to read, which does make it better. It was not sent out by a PR professional, who can often be the worse culprits, but by someone close to the project. So I’ve modified (slightly) some of the ire that I first put up. Overall, this was a learning process…and I was annoyed when first posting this.

The release was first sent as an attachment, which is bad practice as it means I have open the thing, extra work in the way of me reading it. The release itself has been massaged well, with all the well-oiled marketing speak. Links were difficult to copy and paste, being in-line instead of spelt out. Although the video embed code was provided, there was a request that before it got used elsewhere I’d have to send them contact details of where it was going to be used. Come on Yahoo, you know better than that!!!! View Source is your friend here, if you want to grab the code, as they don’t make it easy to share.

Post from: EveryJoe

Yahoo Will Harry date Sally?