The Marketing of Caine’s Arcade

 

It’s pretty rare these days that I find something truly original, interesting, or fun on the Internet (sorry, I’m just not a cat pictures guy, never have been and never will be). So I watched with a little bit of skepticism—as I do with all Internet videos—the Caine’s Arcade video that people were recently talking about. Turns out it’s a great video and you should spend the 11 minutes to watch the entire thing.

What struck me a few days after I watched it was just how true the old marketing adage really is: “It doesn’t matter how great your product is, if nobody knows about it.” Without the superbly crafted documentary, more than likely, nobody outside of Smart Parts would ever have known about the arcade.

This is a great example of content marketing. The “marketing” material has intrinsic value that is separate from the “product,” which in this case is the arcade. What if the video had been awful? What if the video was shot on a shaky camera phone with a warthog-like laugh track added by the videographer as he exclaimed: ‘this is freaking awesome?’

If the video had been terrible, I don’t think Caine’s Arcade would have gained the success it has had. It validates the importance of thinking about the value that your marketing efforts are adding. It all has an impact on the success of the product. What if the filmmaker had just posted a text message to his social networks? What if he had some great photos, but no video? What if he had good photos and a crappy video? When you think about the concept of content marketing, you need to consider how your audience interacts with content and what value that content brings to them.

Sure you could say that the success of the Caine’s Arcade video comes from the story and from Caine’s passion for his project. I totally agree. The story is absolutely fantastic. It has tension, dedication, passion, ingenuity, and more. But I still think that, without the help of the documentary, the story would be nothing more than a smart boy and his cardboard fun land in East Los Angeles.