Social Genius

If you were on Facebook or YouTube over the past 3 days then at some point you probably encountered and maybe even watched the WestJet Christmas Miracle [video - http://bit.ly/1e9d3ZZ].  If you haven't go watch it now and then come back.

Many people's first reaction beyond who is WestJet is wow how generous of the company (it was my initial reaction).  I just happened to see the commercial again when I was on YouTube and noticed that since it was first posted on Dec. 8, 2013 (4 days ago) it has already received 16,654,700 views!  In addition to that it has received 109,383 (0.66%) thumbs up, and only 2,823 (0.017%) thumbs down.

Think about it.  This is 16,654,700 clicks not just basic impressions.  I'm curious as to how much their entire production including gifts actually cost them?  $1.00 per click would be $16,654,700 which seems drastically high but what do I know about the cost of productions.  At $0.10 per click then it would have cost $1,665,470 and that still seems high to me.  If we drop the cost to $0.01 per click then it would have cost us $166,547 which seems like a reasonable budget.

At the rate of $0.01 how much does an acquisition cost them?  To come up with a starting point I chose 700 (0.004%) acquisitions from the 16,654,700 which gives us a rate of $237.92.  I picked 700 going towards the very low end and believe the rate will only go down from there especially considering acquisitions should continue to rise as the click numbers rises.  Now if we only knew how much an acquisition is worth to them?

Seems to be a very effective and affordable marketing and advertising plan that utilizes the power of social media.

UPDATE: On Dec. 18, 2013 the youtube views of the video are at 30,260,070.