Napster – Getting the Marketing Right (and Wrong)

Don’t you just love it when the world turns upsidedown? Napster dropped a bundle on a failed advertising campaign at the SuperBowl a week or two ago:

Napster’s Super Bowl ad voted the biggest loser The Register
Napster has been awarded the title of Super Bore by viewers ranking the advertisements from last night’s football championship.
Napster’s ad – which claimed it costs $10,000 to fill Apple’s iPod with music and just $14.95 a month to rent as much music as possible via Napster’s new To Go service – placed last in a survey taken by USA Today. Companies paid close to $2.4m for a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl. Napster’s commercial trailed all 54 other spots, according to the people surveyed by the newspaper. (here)

But their viral marketing campaign Napster Strip Tease – incredibly hot and sexy (no censors in cyberspace) – would’ve cost them next to nothing to distribute and is still zinging around the ‘net a month or two later.

Isn’t it ironic that it’s Napster that made such a boo-boo? After all, they were the company that first introduced the possibilities of peer2peer distribution!

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