This is an old article I wrote. But it’s good for now!
One of the questions people ask me most in this business (just after “Do you really have to charge me for that?” and “Can I see something tomorrow?) is “Can you make a viral component for this?” I always cringe when I hear it. Even now, after all this time, the phrase “viral marketing” seems really cheesy. Hasn’t marketing always been based on word of mouth? Do we have to give it a disease-riddled name just because the medium has changed? My protestations aside, the term has stuck, and for better or worse, we at the Barbarian Group have done a fair amount of it. My coworkers and I always have a pretty good idea, before we even finish, whether it would fly or not. We’ve noticed a few consistent factors, and I’ve boiled them down to 5 handy rules on viral marketing:
Viral Marketing is neither e-cards, nor is it an add-on. All too often potential clients want to cover all the bases with one interactive initiative. They want to build what they think is an robust site, and then simply tack on some e-cards to it, to give it a viral component. Always remember: there has to be a compelling reason for the user to send around a link or a site: The ability for a user to spread the word does not equate with a reason for him/her to bother.
Accept that you may not be able to control your brand completely with good viral marketing. “Branding” has been so dominant in advertising theory for so long now, we often forget that it’s just one theory. A good one, to be sure, but it has its limits. Viral Marketing cannot necessarily be branded. I’ve found it’s best to be 100% up-front about this with your client, from the beginning. The last thing you want to have happen is to develop an amazingly funny, viral video and have the client insist that their logo and tagline end it. Your target market is amazingly media savvy – that’s why you’re trying to get to them with viral marketing and not a print ad, right? – and they will resenting any overt manipulation. In general, viral marketing works because it conveys the sense that a company is about more than money and branding, that it has the same sense of fun and the same worldview as its customers. This worldview is not a corporate, branded one.
Viral Marketing is especially susceptible to too many cooks in the kitchen. In retrospect, this is the single biggest stumbling block for good viral marketing. A great idea is born, and between the great idea and the public finally experiencing it, there are any number of intermediate stages of approval – an agency creative, his/her superior, the client, the client’s boss, the president of the client company and, if you’re uniquely unlucky, there’s a parent company with a whole new batch of stakeholders. When people ask us “why did such-and-such campaign get so successful?”, 9 times out of 10, it’s because no one was paying attention to us. Brand managers were on vacation, or they didn’t care about interactive. When that’s not an option, remember that the ability to massage your work unfettered through these approvals, along with the ability to secretly skip over them, is as important as a good idea when it comes to viral marketing.
Trust your instincts, but do a little market testing. If you don’t think it’s funny, no one else will either. Listen to yourself as you work on the campaign. You’ll know, deep down, if it’s going to work or not. If you have doubts, don’t ignore them. And don’t send something out in the world if you don’t genuinely think it will be effective. That being said, the echo chamber is a real risk. Find some people in the demographic, and pitch the idea to them. If the bulk of them don’t laugh right away, it might be time to head back to the drawing board.
Sometimes, even the best creative needs a little push. It’s easy to get dogmatic about viral marketing and say “if it’s good, it’ll take right off.” But the internet is a big place, and unless you really know how to work it and drive traffic immediately, it can be hard to get people to notice your endeavors. We’ve had campaigns sit on the web for months before they took off, and by then it can be too late. Consider a small banner campaign to kick things off, or, better yet, think about hiring a firm to “seed” the campaign (I know, viral seeding. Ick). A relatively small investment here can mean the difference between a lost investment or a fantastic ROI.
Another insight, from a letter to AdAge I wrote last year:
Mass marketing works consistently, viral marketing fails or works spectacularly. The allure of viral marketing is not that it works better, it’s that it might work much better, for a lot less. The downside, of course, is that viral marketing might not work at all: we, as marketers, don’t “make virals,” we make things that sometimes “go viral.”
It’s probably time that brands start thinking of viral marketing as one component of your marketing: one that might provide massive additional benefits for a small amount of money, but then again, might not. Win some, lose some. But over time, with a consistent, methodical approach to it, the extra cost will pay for itself over a broad spectrum of endeavors. Even the most cautious investor still likes to play a hot stock tip, just not with their 401k.
Watched The Happening today for 20 minutes. My wife Caroline had not seen it and I had told her how absolutely terrible (and irresponsible, because of the suicides) it is and she was mildly curious. So, we caught it midway on Showtime. It started with the so-bad-it’s-funny scene where Mark Wahlberg talks to the plastic plant. Here’s a clip of it. Oops, Twentieth Century Fox pulled all uses of this clip for copyright reasons. Why? What’s wrong with these people? When will Hollywood learn that YouTube and all of its friends (like, in this case, reddit) are EXCELLENT promotional mediums for copyrighted content? No one is going to watch an entire movie for free on YouTube but people will certainly watch a bunch of scenes from a movie for free on YouTube/friends and then, more interested than before, would be more likely to watch the ENTIRE MOVIE in the theater, or on DVD, or on Showtime. Right?
When I make my movie (I am writing an excellent horror movie with Caroline) I will release almost every scene on the Internet ahead of time and then people will want to see it all put together on a glorious big screen. Done.
Five years ago today, a bunch of youngsters at two companies called The Barbarian Group and Crispin, Porter + Bogusky launched a small minisite three days in advance of the late night running of some broadcast spots. They wanted to iron out any last minute wrinkles in the site by emailing it around to a few more friends, and get a little early buzz before the spots ran.
In the next 48 hours, before the spots even had a chance to air, the little viral site that could had already bombarded the poor XServe in Crispin’s internal data center with 25 million hits. Within days, a cultural phenomenon was spawned.
All for a creepy dude in a chicken suit with garters, who looked like he was running some sort of shady web cam operation.
AAnd here it is, five years later. Let’s take a moment to pay tribute to this noble chicken, and let’s look at the impact he had, and where his place might be in marketing today. Man, it’s a good thing I document everything in my life. The events are getting hazy, the facts are starting to be lost to the sands of time. Some pictures I can only find as lo-res GIFs. But we shall persevere!
on February 25, 2009 at 11:31 AM
filed under: Viral Marketing
Boston Globe Article yesterday about viral marketing and promotion and the need, or lack thereof, to pull down a site after its initial launch. The best bit, of course, is a reference to our Subservient Chicken as the “granddaddy of the genre.” Ha.
The most interesting part is the suggestion that the internet is becoming littered with remnants of past web campaigns. I kinda like that notion. Viral campaign pollution. Someone should make a bot that cleans it all up, like in Wall-E.
on January 26, 2009 at 03:43 PM
filed under: Viral Marketing
Boy was it a good time on Saturday. For those of you who weren’t able to join, I’ve got a recap below on some highlights from the agenda. So here is my story of ROFLThing NYC, from a Client Service perspective…
on January 22, 2009 at 04:27 PM
filed under: Viral Marketing
I hereby announce my candidacy for Mayor of The Barbarian Group. I have created a website, that shall grow organically as the election draws closer, in order to provide voters with information about my platform as well as my opinions in regards to the most pressing issues of the day. http://dinesforabettertomorrow.com
on October 29, 2008 at 12:08 PM
filed under: Viral Marketing
Really interesting article over at WSJ on the Wassup guys, whom were made infamous from their Budweiser commercials of the late ‘90s. The interesting thing to me, is not that the actors all got together again to make this updated political statement, but rather, that this is a case of a film maker who licensed his idea to a major brand for a set period of time, and now since the licensing deal has been expired for the past 3 years, that film maker is able to feed off of the fame it already produced for him. Its a very smart way to work.
It has me thinking, what if our brands of yester year were always licensed like this? What if Tony the Tiger’s contract was up and then he moved on to promote the green party to help conservation of our natural resources and wildlife? Or imagine the Country Crock couple endorsing their religiously motivated family planning issue? To me, this is opening a whole new space for consumerism to turn into activism. And maybe that is a good thing right now.
on May 31, 2009 at 09:16 PM
