Lion Man, The Final Chapter?

I previously wrote about the Lion Man of Tanzania commercials here and here.

This might be the final chapter. The television commercials are finally delivering the payoff. The new Ford Focus… wait for it… will turn you from an animal into a social animal. Ford is outright saying, this car will get you friends.

In the final commercial, the lion man is driving his car around with a group of attractive friends. He went from “never being able to integrate into normal society” to party animal. Ahhhh, I get it.

The thing that I wonder about is what happened to the online campaign? Where did it go? They ran a couple of teasers on a couple of websites, tried to submit those teasers to some social bookmarking sites, and … then what? What happened?

I’m not sure. I should email the agency I contacted earlier to find out what happened. But of course I doubt they will tell me.

Perhaps the final question is why the viral component didn’t work. I have a theory. Basically, the lion man concept wasn’t original enough. The lion man is very similar to the cave man, which as a spokesman is overused in advertising in the past couple of years. Don’t get me started on the stupidity of the Cave Man from Geico and how they managed to even get a TV sitcom out of that. So as soon as people see the “lion man” or hear about it, they immediately make the connection to advertising. It’s not a surpise any more. The best viral ideas are 100% original.

Second, there didn’t seem to be any destination site online for this campaign. There was no www.lionman.com or anything. The only links I could find were “ads” within Canoe and The Star. A web page that is simply an ad is not a viral destination.

Third, they didn’t leverage any of the existing viral places that well. They could have posted some clips to youtube. Or Break.com. Or Facebook or MySpace.

Anyways, I’m sure the campaign is over now. Interesting experiment, from which I hope the agencies have learned from. And as I said in my last post, I’m curious as to what online components, if any, were cancelled. Thats the only way this would make more sense.