Viral marketing is a good word for it. A good viral campaign can spread a message like the plague on steroids. But it can just as quickly bite you. Cool but spooky territory. Fortunately, Karl Long over at Experience Curve has some trenchant advice for CMO’s trying to wade through this stuff without getting their legs blown off.
One of the benefits of working in advertising, besides the short hours and the lavish cocktail parties every day at 3 pm, is the fact that we are living in the future. If it’s digital, social, technological, or just plain new, chances are we’re on top of it, and finding ways to use it. So by default, a lot of this stuff is second nature to us. It’s not that way with everybody, though.
It is an unfortunate but understandable reality that while we often marvel at digital projects that spread like wildfire across the web, we rarely get a chance to look at the numbers behind them. Between January and May, we built, launched and monitored Jerzify Yourself (warning: sound on autoplay) to get just such a glimpse [...]
These days almost every marketing program is developed with integration in mind, and the assumption is that all of the integration needs to happen at once. What I think is interesting in retrospect about the Old Spice Man is that the heavily interactive piece didn’t happen at launch.
This revolution is focused on flavor and is unifying our nation’s shifting populations into a shared narrative.
We’ve finally settled in at our new digs at 53 State Street, a stone’s throw from Quincy Market, the Aquarium, and the Freedom Trail.
For over a year, Hill Holliday and Liberty Mutual have been working on a mutli-pronged integrated campaign we call The Responsibilty Project. It’s an outgrowth of our TV campaign. With its message of personal responsibility and doing the right thing, it hit a nerve like few things we’ve ever been involved with.
Not long ago, Dave Droga of Droga 5 in New York, did an amazing campaign for UNICEF. It was called The TAP Project. The idea was to raise awareness of the fact that 5,000 children die every day because of unsafe drinking water. To help raise badly needed funds, The TAP Project got hundreds of New York restaurants to participate by asking diners to contribute a dollar for their drinking water.
Thanks for the link to Karl Long’s article.
I would propose that it is possible to reduce Karl’s ideas to the following?
“Viral marketing becomes viral when it ceases to be marketing but instead becomes entertainment.”
Is that what John Batelle meant when he wrote recently, “Advertising is Content”? (Click the following link) http://battellemedia.com/archives/002821.php
Thanks to Robert Scoble for the heads-up on this blog post by Eric Sink.
I think you’ll find it as interesting as Robert did. In Robert’s words, “Eric Sink is a marketing genius.”
Here’s the link:
http://www.ericsink.com/articles/Buzz.html
Thanks for the link and the kind words guys. BTW I found a related post you might like called the Seven Deadly Sins of Advertising Via Viral Video: http://nalts.wordpress.com/2006/08/24/seven-deadly-sins-of-advertising-via-viral-video/
Cheers,
karl