Sprint, the cellular provider, has launched an a website called “Waitless” (http://www.waitless.org/) to promote their early night minutes feature, which starts at 7PM instead of most competitors who start at 9PM.  The site features video tips, called Sprintcuts, for saving time on everyday things like pouring ketchup (good tip), parking your car (terrible tip), and even how to soothe a baby.  Additionally, the site offers a calculator to help you figure out how much time you will spend in your life doing “boring” things.  Will this campaign succeed or flop?

Here is one of the (funnier) time-saving ads they made:

This campaign has the potential to be a huge success, but some modifications are necessary.  This is a case of “good idea, bad implementation” for several reasons.  

Didn’t your mom teach you how to share?

As any child learns early in school, sharing is an integral part of getting along with others and being a social being.  In fact, one of the most common actions online today is sharing - sharing links, sharing videos, sharing chain letters, and so on.  While Sprint did include a “Share” button after each video, I was disappointed to find it just attempts to open up Outlook, instead of at the very least offering me an email form to fill out right on the site.  I didn’t appreciate the irony of them wasting my time having to open a whole new program just to “share” their site…a site dedicated to time. On top of that, they didn’t have any options to share the videos or the site via social networking and bookmarking sites, such as Digg, Myspace, etc.  What this tells me is that the developers of the site either aren’t aware of the largest web trends (not a good sign), or were too lazy to spend time integrating those features (not a good sign either).

YouTube where art thou?

It is hard to even imagine that part of a serious video ad campaign wouldn’t include using YouTube to promote the ads, so I was surprised when it took quite a few clicks of digging around the Waitless site just to find they do indeed have a YouTube Sprintcuts page which features all of the videos, and allows people to subscribe to the Sprintcuts channel to receive all future Sprintcuts.  As of this writing, the channel only had 460 subscribers and just over 65,000 views - hardly a serious campaign result.  Sprint needs to focus more heavily on getting their video ads shown on YouTube in quantity if they expect to have any success.

Watch out - don’t step on the long tail!

While the web has made the hobbyists of long tail interests easier to group, Sprint doesn’t seem to have made any attempt to reach the very people who are actually concerned with making the best use of their time - namely readers of the following “time savvy” blogs:While the web has made the hobbyists of interests easier to group, Sprint doesn’t seem to have made any attempt to reach the very people who actually concerned with making the best use of their time - namely readers of the following “time savvy” blogs:

- LifeHacker
- LifeHack
- Consumerist

I recommend to Sprint to advertise heavily on those three (in addition to dozens of other related) blogs.  This would make a more consistent marketing message.

This Sprint campaign is still new, so there is time to change tactics and make a winning strategy.  It never ceases to amaze me how execs in ad agencies and other companies know the word “YouTube” or “MySpace”, but don’t make use of “geek marketers” to assure their campaigns are actually carried out properly.  It’s easy to know what the latest fad is - it’s a lot harder to understand how it works and how you need to play the game to succeed with it.