Three years ago Youtube.com stormed onto the headlines of The New York Times on a daily basis. The early adaptors grabbed anything they could to create web commercials. The grainy footage of many of these pioneers still can be found on this popular video search engine. As these brave souls treaded unfamiliar ground many Michigan based companies plummeted into obscurity. Even as 20,000 people left the State of Michigan smart businesses avoided traditional media such as Yellow Page advertising, newspaper advertising and commercial radio.
This radical approach to advertising has proved fruitful for such innovative companies such as Farmington Hills based Windsor Beauty Supply. This beauty wholesaler has used nothing but non-traditional tactics and online search engine techniques to build and strengthen its brand. Finally, after three years of hard struggle and determination this beauty wholesale shop has become a sleeping giant in the beauty industry. Windsor Beauty Supply now has five locations including Farmington Hills, Fraser and Grand Rapids. The momentum is growing and it owes a lot of its success to the innovations of Web 2.0 and internet visionary, Ted Cantu.
“We have ignored the 40,000 dollar start up fees for commercial radio. We ignored a bill for $63,000 for a lousy 20 minute web commercial video. We produced everything ourselves and have taken the web world by storm. We had a zero budget in the early days and our experimental clips have promoted our products and even introduced new Michigan based products such as Color Vanish to the world. The average viewing time for our web pages is now a phenomenal 8 minutes. Most corporate web pages only get viewed for 90 seconds tops. That’s called a bounce rate. We are able to keep our viewers glued to the screen” adds innovator Ted Cantu.
Keeping the viewers glued to the screen is what its all about. The group Hot Metro Finds have been creating a real ruckus in traditional media circles. They have been showing Michigan businesses how to survive, cut their budgets, blast out their brands on the Internet for the past 4 years. This has created a lot of backlash in the media community.
“I still get hate mail from Yellow Pages people. I get a lot of angry pay per click vendors leaving nasty messages at our main office in Farmington Hills. I used to get a lot of foul mouth radio sales people calling our 800 number. What I do upsets people. I cause Michigan business owners to wake up and think before they blow loads of cash on useless media that yields zero response” adds Cantu.
The media that Cantu creates is not Hollywood and will not win any Emmys. But people do watch them and will sometimes watch them over and over again. They will often refer their friends and co-workers to watch them and the videos have a tendency to get passed on to other potential customers. That’s what viral video is all about. The clips have been circulating on the web and living in multiple online services. Some clips have made it as far as Berlin, Germany, Australia, Japan, and Bangladesh. Of course they work just as good right here in good ol’ Metro Detroit.
