x-posted from RTCRM Spark Blog

I’m not sure I know anyone who works in advertising who doesn’t love the show Mad Men. Their season 3 promotion allows you to create your Mad Men avatar! I had to jump right on this. That’s me in the bright blue in the middle.

I noticed that the cartoon versions of Don Draper and Roger Sterling (left) are looking a lot like RTC’s Matt Connor and Jeff Ross. Does that make Barry Kessel the Bertram Cooper of RTC?

Needless to say, I think this promotion is a brilliant use of social media and viral marketing. Check the Twitter avatar of half the people who work in advertising and they have changed over to Mad Men avatars in the past few days. But the question always becomes, how do you prove success on promotions like this. RTC wasn’t involved in this promotion, but here’s what I’d do. Until the show airs, you can’t determine real ROI of increased viewers. So, right now we’d be watching the leading indicators. But what are those leading indicators? Here are a few of the stats we’d be watching:

Stats as of 07/29/2009 for past 7 days:

• URL posted to Twitter 685 times
• URL posted to 112 blogs
• “Mad Men Yourself” mentioned on 84 blogs
• “Mad Men Avatar” mentioned on 65 blogs
• 315 results on Flickr for “mad men yourself”
• Posted to Delicious 224 times

One thing we learn right away is that Twitter fans are Mad Men fans. It’s an interesting piece of data for future promotions. A quick check on my Facebook friends showed more than a few have also utilized and shared their avatars! Names are obscured to protect their privacy.

Lots to learn from this promotion, and lots of fun to be had!

[tags]mad men, mad men yourself, marketing, advertising, social, viral, word of mouth[/tags]