Alltel has embraced Web 2.0 marketing methods, and appears to be seeing some success. Ad Week magazine examines some of Alltel’s web marketing strategies which includes MySpace pages and stand alone flash websites. The marketing campaigns feature Chad, Alltel’s fictional “cool” employee. Chad’s MySpace page quickly garnered 3,500 “friends” A stand alone flash website followed, centered on the ManCave, where bungling employees from Alltel’s competitors meet and plot how to defeat Chad.
Ad Week points out that much of the marketing throughout this entire web campaign is much more subtle than other similarly developed web campaigns. Nevertheless, Alltel’s Chad and corresponding ManCave strategy has built a solid following. Alltel admits that the promotion is a long term exercise and that the results from this strategy won’t be realized for some time. For right now, it’s a branding exercise. One that Alltel is quite pleased with, especially considering the costs are relatively low, when compared with more traditional media advertising and marketing tactics.
If using flash and MySpace are pushing the envelope, telecom is in serious trouble.