Hello Bloggers - Goodbye Cellulite

Nivea's campaign for it's new Goodbye Cellulite product is kinda interesting. It's online only - no TV, no print, no outdoor, no nothing - and centres around a blog that's soliciting feedback from people who've been sent product samples, and a bunch of videos.

(Disclosure: we're being paid by the marketing agency, DBM, who created the blog, to track the buzz around this campaign measure the online impact of the blog and the videos. Note: we have not been paid or even asked to write this post. To be totally clear, no one is being paid to blog about the product and that's one of the things that I like about the campaign: it's asking real people to give honest feedback and is simply trying to increase the visibility of that feedback).

 

Sending out product samples to people and encouraging them to blog about the results, both on their own blogs and on the DBM blog, is smart. If this product does what it promises, the results will be obvious and there'll be plenty of  people making genuine recommendations. Giving product samplers lightweight  tools to do that and surfacing the conversations is a great idea.

The video strategy, on the other hand, seems much less sure-footed. The one below is over two-and-a-half minutes long, which seems incredibly long-form. It's moderately shareable. You can get the embed code from the DBM blog, though not from the BoreMe page where it's been seeded, and not from the Nivea microsite.

The Nivea microsite makes me go absolutely bonkers. It opens in a pop-up window and suppresses the address bar. So if I want to send you a link to one of  the videos, there's nary a URL in sight. Not smart. Wouldn't be so bad if the inbuilt tell-a-friend feature was usable. It isn't. Dark colors, low contrast, input fields too small for the inputs, no indication as to what inputs are mandatory. I managed to fire off an email to a friend, but it took me two or three goes. The video's OK, but I'm not going to go through this much pain to send it on to someone.

UPDATE: I've updated this post to make it clear that although the DBM blog is about Nivea's Goodbye Cellulite product, Nivea are not writing, controlling, moderating or responding to any of the content on that blog.