Taxes and Social Media
Posted April 5th, 2007 by Char Lyn
April 17 is fast approaching. Yes, this year you get two extra days to file your taxes since April 15 is a Sunday and April 16 is Emancipation Day in Washington D.C. Here in Boston, the South Station post office stays open until midnight on tax day so you can really procrastinate. Some people used that extra time to upload an original rap to TurboTax’s YouTube contest. The contest is now closed to entries, but you can still vote on your fave.
In honor of tax season, I thought it might be fun to do a little math and estimate the revenue generated by the contest. To do this, we need the following facts and assumptions:
- ≈ 1.5 million views of contest promo videos by rapper Vanilla Ice
- 370 entries submitted by YouTubers
- ≈ 3000 views per entry (assumption based on a range of 800 to 10,000 views per submission, with many in the 2000 range)
- ≈ 5% of viewers will visit TurboTax.com (assumption based on available research of 0.4% to 20% click through rates on video campaigns)
- ≈ 5% of site visits will result in product purchase (shot in the dark assumption)
- standard purchase price is $ 49.95
Now for the math:
If you read through the assumptions, you know that this is very soft math, but with a microsite, they will be able to track the actuals very closely. And, that is the advantage of this type of campaign. Unlike traditional magazine and TV ads, a company can track the success, or failure, of an online video marketing campaign.
