A brilliant campaign that stumbles badly on the finishing line

Today I saw the Make Me Super site which is a campaign site with a funny personalisation theme. This type of campaign is the “older cousin” to the campaigns with only name personalisation I have written about more than once. Basically:

Get a video from a friend, with your own name mysteriously included in the video, and then pass the same clip on to your friends, but with their names in the video.

This one is a bit more advanced and also uses a photo and customized lyrics, as well as the persons sex. The idea for this campaign is brilliant, but Kodak has stumbled badly on the finishing line, and will not be able to reap all the potential benefits of the creative idea.

Mistake 1:
They have included a “Send to friend” possibility, but the link in the mail they send doesn’t work. The movies created don’t load as they should. I have tried with three different computers on two different Internet connections. I always get the same message – “Hmmm… something seems to be wrong with your internet connection”.

Well, it isn’t. Too bad for Kodak.
Try the link yourself (they might have fixed it)

Mistake 2:
There is no possibility to embed just the movie itself. Everybody has to go to the site, and therefore it is impossible to create “satellites of content” that can drive traffic to the site from important Internet hubs where people gather, like Facebook, MySpace, personal blogs etc.

It is a pity you can’t really pick whatever name you want, but there is a very good reason. Even the lyrics are personalised!

If they could just fix the basic requirements to make something go really viral, this would, I am sure! They managed to get the content right, but they have not at all managed to optimize for viral spread by making it as easy as possible to pass on, and embed on other sites.

Anyway, I just had to show this, so here comes the movie I created after working a bit to record it from screen, and uploading it to youtube: