Planning for viral marketing is like planning for a lightning strike – it’s totally random.
I guess that it was inevitable that someone would come along and try to piss all over The Tipping Point and all the reams of breathless boosterism (I admit – some of it written by me) of viral marketing, the wisdom of the crowds, ideas that stick, purple cows, etc. etc. Ad Age interviews Columbia U sociology prof Duncan Watts, who says that while the influencers are, um, influential, even ordinary people can start a viral meme contagion, if the meme is strong enough.
Basically, the tools that MySpace and other social networks are giving researchers are allowing them to track the spread and adoption of ideas and marketing campaigns much, MUCH faster and more accurately than has ever been done before. The conclusions? It looks a lot like good old mass marketing, with a big dollop of randomnality thrown in, just to roil the stomachs of the ad buyers even more. This looks like the worst of two worlds — all the cost of the old media “saturation bombing” campaigns, with all the randomness and lack of audience size of the New Media world. Nice. Pass the Maalox, please.
Here’s a couple of nut grafs:
Virality is an outcome, not a channel to be planned. In Mr. Watts’
chaotic conception of the world, you might as well try to plan for a
terrorist attack or some other random event.
“We cannot predict what is going to happen,” he said. “Things happen
randomly. You want strategies that don’t depend on being right, but do
depend on being able to measure things very well. You throw things out
there, with as low cost as you can manage and with as great a diversity
as you can stand and then you see what gets taken up.”This thinking, if you buy it, has dramatic implications for a
marketing business most believe is entering a post-mass world. Media is
fragmenting and consumers are more skeptical and harder to reach,
leaving viral and word-of-mouth as the most attractive cost-efficient
alternative to paid advertising. A way to slip into culture without
paying millions for media, it transfers the work of distribution to
consumers themselves, which is not only efficient in terms of cost but
it also grants viral content or ideas more credibility since it came
from a friend. In short, advertising is expensive and hard-to-believe;
viral is cheap and credible. It is the un-mass.
So our takeaway from all this is that there are no constants to rely upon, no way to predict what kind of response a campaign will evoke, just sign great big checks, throw it all up against the wall and hope against hope that something sticks? Man, I’d love to be in the board room when *that* pitch is made in the creative planning session.
What’s missing from all this focus on how group informational distribution dynamics works is, of course, the value judgment on whether or not the meme is funny, interesting and worth passing along – or just more of the half-baked crapola passing for “viral” these days. I say of course, because the judgment call on whether a campaign grabs me or repulses me is a matter of how I’m wired. De gustibus non est disputatum, and all that. In other words, what I see as a shallow, shitty campaign can still hook in millions of people – viz the success of American Idol, which I have never watched. Shit, I haven’t even listened to an entire Kelly Clarkson song. I know who they are, I know that everyone else knows who they are. I just don’t like a modern-day Monkees. Sue me.
Watts goes on to seize on the Next Big Thing, which is the mass group of dimwitted followers out there, that can be cajoled into buying Axe body spray, eating 7-11 chili dogs and watching Saw III, as long as you blow a fatass wad of cash to put ad and marketing messages up on any surface. Scream louder and from everywhere people … waitaminit … isn’t that the approach that everyone is basically using these days, and that is being proven on a daily basis to no longer really provide a decent return?
I’m sorry, but I still believe that viral marketing *can* work – simply because the evidence has shown on repeated occasions that it *has* worked. It’s just a matter of having the right product, the right message, at the right time, on the right media platform. Don’t be too quick to shovel dirt & dance on the grave – there’s life in the viral marketing monster yet … although I do grind my teeth a bit when I see outfits like BzzAgent, which is a place designed to attract young hipsters and to try to “empower” them into become “brand evangelists.”
Oh, if only it were so easy.
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