Shop.org members Seth Greenberg and Pinny Gniwisch are really pushing the envelope when it comes to marketing on YouTube. I had the pleasure of interviewing both of them for my article for MarketingProfs.com, “How To Market on YouTube“. Seth, formerly of eHobbies and now with Intuit, discussed his company’s Tax Rap campaign conducted on YouTube and sporting ’80s rapper Vanilla ice as the spokesman. Pinny, founder and EVP Marketing at jewelry etailer Ice.com, has been hitting the streets of Manhattan, L.A., and elsewhere seeking funny and enlightening thoughts on loved ones and special occasions — from both celebrities and the average Joe.

I wanted to share with you the notes from these two interviews, which you won’t find in the article or elsewhere on the MarketingProfs site.

First off, notes from my interview with Seth Greenberg of Intuit…

It was crucial from the outset to sharpen the campaign and make it less corporate. They wanted to have fun with it — before people made fun of it. They probably wouldn’t have made it as crazy except for the fact that they landed Vanilla Ice as spokesperson. They threw out the idea, the timing was right, Vanilla Ice was available. So they flew to Florida and showed up at his house in Palm Beach. Vanilla Ice came up with his own rap. It was a load of fun, a really good process.

It took a couple of weeks to land Vanilla Ice as spokesman. The agreed deal was they got two hours at his house but Vanilla Ice gave them another two hours at no extra charge because he was having such fun. Vanilla Ice has been a big supporter. Vanilla Ice is very polarizing and that is the key… that is what is making this a phenomenon on YouTube.

The offline component has been much bigger than the online component. For example, Tax Rap was on Entertainment Weekly’s “Hit List” in the #10 slot. AdCritic was quoted as saying: “I don’t know how to read this campaign…”

There were 50 mentions of the Tax Rap campaign on TV — from CNN on down (Access Hollywood, local TV stations, etc.). It also made page 6 of the New York Post. Also, 800 blogs refer to the campaign.

Not measuring direct sales. Attempting to measure buzz but that is an elusive metric. Measuring the amount of press pick-up. Another thing they are measuring is how many people have left email addresses.

The way the contest worked is there was a $25,000 grand prize, and people submitted a video of their rap about taxes in order to compete for the prizes. All video submissions have to be in by March 30, voting starts on March 31 for about a week. Vanilla Ice picks the winner in April around the tax deadline.

They had about one million views of their videos. Intuit paid for visibility on the YouTube home page — over ten million people will see that. They also paid for a contest channel and a branded channel. Seth strongly encourages investing in a branded channel. This stuff is not inexpensive, but Seth believes it is hard to scale virally without it.

A tip that Seth offered: court people with huge subscriber bases. Those are the “connectors” (that’s Tipping Point talk for influencers/sneezers). So, for example, somebody might get 50,000 views of their submission because of their subscriber base. That then leads to Intuit piggy-backing on that submitter’s visibility and reputation in YouTube.

And now here’s my notes from my interview with Pinny Gniwisch…

Pinny went around different cities as “Mr. Cupid”, asking passersby to share their thoughts, feelings and experiences with Valentine’s Day — in places like Times Square, Rockerfeller Center, L.A., Las Vegas, Montreal, and Deer Valley, Utah — armed with his microphone and cameraman in tow.

For his second campaign, he interviewed actors walking in and out of a famous restaurant in L.A. asking them about their mothers and about Mother’s Day. Here’s an example: Pinny interviewing the Three 6 Mafia.

The first Mr. Cupid video got 10,000 views within a week, the six or seven other videos after that got featured by the editor. He has a Mr. Cupid channel and has recorded 50,000 views to that channel. He didn’t anticipate the success that he has achieved so far. He has 3,000 subscribers to his channel so he has a following and, when he publishes something new to his channel, this new content shows up on each subscriber’s home page.

There is no tracking of sales. They spent only $420 in expenses so this is very cost-effective. It cost $70/hour to shoot the videos. Revver wants to feature his content.