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Beyond transmittance, viral marketing resembles the common cold virus in experts’ inability to understand and manage it with any great degree of certainty. And much like the ultimately-fruitless myriad laboratory hours spent examining the common cold, thousands of column inches and seminar hours have brought marketers no firm control over the practice. The result is that anyone who claims to have all the answers about the why and how of viral marketing is about like the snake oil doctors of yore with magic bottles of cure-all. That said, there are some aspects of viral marketing that are understood.
It is now recognized that one of the essential ingredients in the “why” of the rise of viral marketing is the Internet. Bringing together the most appealing characteristics of the web, online viral marketing can be distributed at low cost and fast, fast, fast. Matt Smith, marketing director of viral marketing company the Viral Factory, points out that the ad community is taking viral more seriously. “As data capture gets increasingly sophisticated and more and more internet users get broadband, I think viral will become as important as other ‘grown-up’ marketing channels,” says Smith.
With household (US, at least) internet access rates predicted by Jupiter Research to be near 80 percent in four years, the increasing popularity of TV-ad-erasing Tivo-like systems, and the implementation of do-not-call lists, web-based marketing strategies certainly do look to have a rosy future.
Understanding the “how” of viral marketing is a little cloudier. The specific aspects of successful viral marketing that are understood tend to be of the “what not to do” variety, with the “how to” stuff existing in the more theoretical, and sometimes ethereal, sense. Martina Zavagno, founder and editor Adverblog.com, says, “An advertising concept, in order to work in a viral perspective, needs to add value to the user’s experience. This value can be explicated in something entertaining, in something educational or in something rewarding.” Wendy Grossman, columnist and author of the book Net.Wars, likens a viral success to making a successful movie: “You need a good idea, you need to execute it well, and you need to have a bit of luck to hit at the right time.”
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Smith points to three important factors. “Creative: Don’t take people for idiots. You want them to pass on your message so give them something they’ll want to pass on. Execution: It’s not good enough just to have a funny idea. Strategy: Seeding is a key issue, as is tracking.”
One detail of viral marketing is universally agreed upon. Justin Kirby, managing director of Digital Media Communications (DMC), says, “The most successful use of viral marketing is not as a standalone technique. It needs to be used strategically as a means to an end, i.e., a way of helping to create buzz and shift product, rather than simply as an end in itself, whereby viral pass-on or buzz generation is the only goal.” He advises that viral marketing be used “as a key part of a brand’s overall marketing mix.” Adding, “Simply generating exposure is not the point of viral campaigns.” So what is the point?
Examining both academic and case study information reveals that viral marketing works in two distinct forms. The first concentrates on offering an incentive for an immediate sale. This form can best be exemplified by something such as a printable discount coupon for a product or a location. The aim of this promotion is to have the deal be good enough that once it’s seeded those who receive it will think to pass it on to their friends and so on. While this variety of viral marketing doesn’t produce an immediate sale in the strictest sense, it does promote proactively on the recipient’s part on behalf of the product or service. This form of viral marketing is really nothing new and works in much the same way that a newspaper coupon has for years.
The other much more knotty form of viral marketing aims at brand building. Viral Factory’s Smith says of these two forms: “A viral that aims to produce an immediate sale needs a very immediate and powerful call to action built into the content. A pure branding viral will aim to be seen by as many people as possible but probably won’t be so concerned with a call to action.” The fact that the latter form of viral marketing is extremely difficult to track in terms of success is just the beginning of its complexity.
Virals that aim to build brand image come in many styles. Everything goes from games to humor deemed too edgy for conventional TV or print media, to what is called “sub-viral,” where an ad spoofing a brand is secretly created by the brand itself and seeded in the hopes that it will be passed on and create buzz for the name. One drawback of viral brand-building is that the communications are very easy to create and even easier to get wrong. Smith says the common mistake is “making a cheap, third-rate commercial and sticking it on the Internet in the misguided belief that that somehow makes it a ‘viral.’ There are an amazing amount of horrible examples of this practice on the web that no one ever sees.”
DMC’s Kirby points out another common mistake: passivity. For example, he says: “Using a Flash game as the material format and believing that it will attract people like moths to a flame. This format is the worst-performing, and uses the most basic viral seeding model, i.e., it sits on a micro-site and has to have traffic driven to it. It’s not capitalizing on the peer-to-peer, file sharing capabilities of the web and the viral technique.”
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As mentioned, one of the most important and difficult aspects of viral marketing is tracking. This is doubly true for brand-building virals. A viral marketing effort aimed at giving a discount on a purchase can be easily tracked by examining how many customers took advantage of the offer in addition to observing how far the viral spread, i.e., where the offer was taken advantage of with regards to where it was originally seeded. However, not many fully reliable utilities exist for tracking the success of an effort that aims simply to create brand awareness. This is why anyone with viral experience continually stresses the importance of using viral marketing as one component of a larger approach.
For example in December 2003, Jockey, an undergarment and leisurewear producer, promoted a “Make a Flake” campaign where surfers could visit a site and create their own virtual snowflake. The flake could then be emailed to a friend, thus incorporating the viral characteristic. By the end of the holiday season the site had recorded over 17 million page views and close to 2 million “snowflakes.” Content-wise, the Make-a-Flake campaign had been a clear success with users. Now, had Jockey left it at that, this would have been a perfect example of viral marketing as a means with no end, a mostly wasted effort. However, in Jockey’s case, through the brand’s sponsorship of the campaign it was able to position its logo on the site and present special offers on its products, including one that corresponded to a Make-a-Flake promotional code. The most attractive detail of the case was that Jockey had done no outside promoting of Make-a-Flake. Through skillful email seeding, the campaign had exemplified everything that is attractive about viral brand building – rapid, positive exposure through trusted word-of-mouth networks for minimal cost.
Of course the increasing recognition that viral marketing is a viable, maybe even necessary, strategy poses risks. True to its name, like a virus that spreads too well and eventually kills its host, an overabundance of low quality viral marketing could annoy surfers and ultimately cause them to ignore it altogether. Net.Wars’ Grossman says, “People are more stressed and have less time, and they get bombarded with more and more ads that eat up the little time they have. If they get one email message a day from a friend saying, ‘Wow, this is cool.’ That’s probably fine. If they get 30, they’ll ask their friends to stop sending them URLs because it’s too much to deal with.”
Kirby sees a glut of viral marketing as part of an overall natural development in quality: “Ultimately, with viral material it’s the users not the advertisers who are in control. So whatever users like will always be successful. The quality of the material in terms of its ability to inspire users is therefore the vital benchmark.”
Smith concurs: “Audiences will become more demanding. [This] will make it all the more important to get it right.”
[5-Apr-2004]
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Abram D. Sauer, former columnist for The China Daily and co-founder of The Chopstick Factory, lives in New York and welcomes freelance opportunities.
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Mar 29, 2004
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Celebrity Branding -- Alycia de Mesa
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As a star ascends it can take a product or two with it. Similarly, as a celebrity falls from grace, so goes the appeal of the brand.
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Jan 5, 2004
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Which Bud's for you? -- Mark Jarvis
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As Czech Budweiser prepares to launch its first international marketing campaign, the battle between the two Buds is bound to rise to a head.
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