Lessons in New Media Marketing: Ashley Tisdale Contest

April 11th, 2007

We really didn’t know who Ashley Tisdale was until just recently. She’s a young singer/actress who is currently well-known for her role on Disney Channel’s TV series “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody.” But her career in total is quite impressive – she was “found” at the age of 3 and has been doing commercials and Broadway shows ever since (see bio here). We noticed her after an impressive jump in online video views this past week – We “found” her because of some impressive new media marketing.

Check out the graph below. After bouncing in the 30K-50K views per day range on YouTube, she had a spike to nearly 114K on 4/6…what happened? After looking at her breakdown of videos, We see that she has one video that threw up an impressive 44K views on 4/6 from almost nothing. It’s a little 17 second clip of her thanking her fans for all the entries to her contest. Wow thousands of views for a thank you. We had to check out this contest.

As part of her new Headstrong album, Ashley asked people to create videos (in honor of being “headstrong”) detailing what their dreams are, because as she appears to have written and can be found on several sites such as ashley-web.org, “I want to hear from you - what are your dreams? If you could do anything in the world what would it be? Are you on your way? Let me know, maybe I can help get you on your way!” We’re not sure if that’s a promise or not, but it seems like plenty have entered. Or at least, plenty have watched Ashley in anticipation of the results. Her marketing folks know what they’re doing! They have found a way to have prospective customers market a music album (and Ashley Tisdale as a brand) for them through the creation of online videos. This is a great example of new media marketing – a contest with no clear end date, frequent unannounced winners (”keep checking back!”), and no clear prize (except maybe the signed 8×10). The only thing that’s clear is interest!

You can see some of the contest submissions here.

Entry Filed under: Music, New Media/Old Media