Sunday, August 22, 2010

How’s That “One Mighty Drop” Thing Working Out?


In an effort to halt a massive slide in perfume sales, the Fragrance Foundation launched a new campaign back at the end of January called One Mighty Drop. Like all cooperative advertising efforts—remember “The other white meat” by the National Pork Board?—the Fragrance Foundation created a nifty slogan: “One drop changes everything”. It also created a weak-ass web site decked out in a psychedelic motif left over from the Yellow Submarine era.

We weren’t the only ones skeptical about this approach. Being nerdish, however, we decided to start tracking the Alexa web traffic rankings of OneMightyDrop.com as a measure of how well it was getting the word out. Today we present the results.

If it’s going to create awareness, the One Mighty Drop web site should draw as much or more traffic as the fragrance blogs we track on the Smell Web Indexes. For the initial week ending February 28, OneMightyDrop was ranked 2,722,004. So for comparison we selected the team blog ISmellThereforeIAm (ranked 2,380,754), and the solo blogs GrainDeMusc (2,674,125) and AyalaSmellyBlog (3,118,021).

How did they all do? Let’s go to the numbers:


Alexa rankings for all four sites stayed were steady until about a week after the FiFi Awards on June 10. At that point OneMightyDrop.com began to fall away from the pack. In mid-August it sank abruptly and last week it went into a full nose dive.

Here at FirstNerve we call that one mighty drop-off.

The Fragrance Foundation would have gotten its message out more effectively by enlisting some well-regarded fragrance bloggers. Just sayin’.

Meanwhile, all these years later, TheOtherWhiteMeat.com is ranked 361,126 worldwide and 74,066 in the U.S. It has 248 sites linking into it versus 6 for OneMightyDrop.com. Looks like the perfume industry has been outplayed by the pork producers.

9 comments:

StyleSpy said...

I couldn't figure out that site: were they trying to sell me something? Teach me something? It seemed to have no discernible purpose except to give a little work to a web designer. Checked it out once, never went back.

~x~ said...

why don't you have the buttons so i can "like" a post to my facegnarl?
trying to kill me?

Avery Gilbert said...

StyleSpy:

I think your experience was shared by many others. This was a wasted opportunity. And get this: for an upcoming OMD promotion they will be giving away flowers at four (count 'em four!) locations in Manhattan.

Avery Gilbert said...

~x~:

Figured it was worth putting a FB button on FN if you'd stop yelling at me.

So I went to the FB site and started reading:

"There are two Like button implementations: XFBML and Iframe. The XFBML version is more versatile, but requires use of the JavaScript SDK. The XFBML dynamically re-sizes its height according to whether . . ."

Schnork--ugm, hunh? Sorry, I keep falling asleep reading it. Maybe later.

Katy Josephine said...

I have not yet visited the site you mention, but I am certain, after reading your post, that many boring activities will prevail before I dooxidiv.

'One mighty drop off'...clever.

Katy Josephine said...

I mean, before I do.

Word verification gone bad.

Simone M said...

Sadly you're so right.
I'm a beauty editor and personally know some of the lovely people at the Fragrance Foundation. I really want them to be more in touch, more relevant, but they just can't get to that level. They simply don't understand online media and although they now say they want to embrace it, they still secretly hold onto that inner feeling that only print is real, and online somehow isn't. (they never said that, this is my opinion based on discussions)

So yes, they developed a very pretty website, but it appears they didn't bother to hire people to create engaging and relevant content. Once you've spent 10 minutes on the site, you're done.

As an online beauty editor, I see this POV all the time as many of the big perfume/cosmetic companies court print editors like royalty and treat legitimate online editors like 2nd class citizens. I've attended some of their events, and they're grateful for the coverage I give them, but every invitation I get comes with an undercurrent that I'm getting a favor from them because I'm one of the few online editors to get this precious invite, as the A-List went to the print editors. Kind of like the kid who gets to sit at the grown-ups table because they've shown they know how to act politely. While I'm happy to be granted that status, it's sad that my (our) genre of media is still taken less seriously.

I'm sorry, I digress. Like you, I wish that One Mighty Drop were better.

And handing out a rose at Macy's as THE Big Fashion Night Out event???? Oh C'mon...puleeze! What a waste of time and effort.

Avery Gilbert said...

Simone M:

Thanks for your thoughtful comment. No digression there--you captured an essential problem with the Fragrance Foundation's approach. They're wedded to print media because the fragrance industry is wedded to the women's books. The full page, full bleed perfume ads are big income and a marker of prestige: "how can we be irrelevant if we're still selling glossy ad pages?"

Some of the FF folks have been there a long time--well before the rise of the Web. They are more comfortable with sitdown events and seating charts for the FiFi Awards than with podcasts, tweets, and blogs. Nothing personal--I'm sure there are other trade associations that trapped in amber.

As for your feeling that every invitation is a favor--well, that's exactly right. And how is it different for the Devil Wears Prada crowd? They've been mainlining the invites so long they don't even get a buzz anymore.

Keep doing your thing. If nothing else, time is on your side.

Olfacta said...

Very interesting! Uh-huh -- bloggers don't get no respect (yet). I'm going to Sniffapalooza this year and wondering if this issue might come up.

Favors, though...every media job I've ever had has this big, teetering pile of favors, and so many aspects are run on them who you owe and who owes you. Kind of like the garbage piled up in "Idiocracy" -- one too many and the whole thing comes crashing down.

And what was so bad about "one drop changes everything" anyway?