The enormous amount of publicity Jennifer Hudson has received over her photo on the cover of her self-named debut album, has been extraordinary. It immediately generated the question of whether it was done intentially in my mind. If it was, it was a brilliant move by the marketers involved.
Here's something to keep in mind about this: people online love to find out if someone has touched up photos. It's become somewhat of a sport for those who discover what they consider a deliberate "faux pas" on the Internet.
Album Photo
Not only does it always generate interest, but the person discovering it gets some coverage as well.
Either way, it's definitely a strategy worth employing at specific times during Internet marketing. Look at the viral nature of the buzz resulting from Hudson's photo. It's actually generated more interest at this time than the album itself.
Recent Photo
Whether the marketers did this on purpose or not is irrelevant (although I think they had to have), what's relevant from an online marketing standpoint is the publicity generated by it.
This is something that couldn't be done too often, as it would lose its marketing power, but adding some type of interesting photo like this as part of a marketing campaign is definitely something to keep in mind when thinking of ways of generating more interest.
Why did this work so well? It satisfied the desire of people believing they've discovered some type of cover up. For whatever reason, this movivates people to talk. Figure out different ways of doing this and it'll create huge viral buzz for your marketing campaign.
The secret is doing it so it's not too difficult to discover.
People prefer to find stuff they consider polically motivated people are attempting to hide. In those cases they'll scour the photo to see if it was changed at all.
With marketing it has to be done differently, as the importance of discovering something like the photo of Jennifer Hudson is different than finding what is considered a politically motivated change to support someone's viewpoint.
That has to be the reason the photo on the album was presented like it was. If Jennifer wasn't made so obviously skinny on the album cover, the photo wouldn't have generated so much interest for her, or for her album, as most wouldn't have even noticed. It has to be something obvious.
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