yeknominc.com

I am reviewing the viral marketing attempt by CareerBuilder that supplements their Super Bowl ad I mentioned previously.

They have built what is supposed to be a company site called yeknominc.com for the monkey company featured in the television spots. Like I said, I liked at least the spot I saw on the Super Bowl. As a viral marketing piece I don’t know how successful this will be. I guess it’s supposed to look like it was designed by monkeys. So it’s hard to get around and it doesn’t make sense.

It doesn’t seem like much of a joke, I don’t know what incentive someone seeing this will have to send to friends and coworkers. By the way, if you are a friend or coworker, don’t send me funny stuff. Seriously, cut it out.

The difficult page design is supposed to be part of the “joke”. Ha ha, monkeys make bad sites. It really gets in the way of the joke because a visitor would probably just leave in confusion before he or she figured out what was going on.

Why did I order a thousand of these damn shirts?

They have some bonus videos, but again, they are hard to find. Here is one and another training video. Both are pretty forgettable unless you think chimps in and of themselves are funny to look at. I was a little impressed at the number of avenues they left open for the site to get around, like with the e-cards and the CafePress storefront, but all in all you would really have to be a huge fan of the commercials to give enough of a damn to send one of the e-cards, much less pay $14.99 for a t-shirt with a CareerBuilder chimp on it.

One plus to the design is the individual URLs for the different sections, so that it’s possible to link to different pages. This is a problem with a lot of Flash-driven sites that leave you unable to link to any page within the site.

Creating something that is purposely cheesy, either in video or on the web, can be very difficult to pull off and requires a lot of nuance. This is just bad design and the content is purely nonsensical.

When you think about it, if a chimp managed to write and produce content like this, it would still be quite amazing. The idea was good, in theory. Luckily their Super Bowl ad was much more effective.

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