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Viral Marketing to Become the Norm?
An anonymous reader writes "One of the oldest advertising companies in the U.S., JWT, has just bought up all the Huffington Post's front-page ad space for a whole week. They are taking the unique approach of trying to create ad content interesting enough to make people want to watch, instead of the traditional ad agency approach of bludgeoning the user base over the head through interstitials and other forced ad techniques. Will the ad companies be able to put forth enough continued effort to make good ads that become viral, or is this just a short phase to gain publicity?"
Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_marketing
Viral marketing it something that is spread by people, not by advertizing agencies. It behaves like a virus - once you release the ad into the wild, it spreads without your control, because people think it's interesting/funny and send it to their friends.
There are many reasons why an advertiser might choose to not flagrantly display their product in an advertisement. However, unless there was a tie-in to the product or brand somehere, the advertising would be pointless. It might be as simple as putting an ad with a certain woman on TV and then having pictures of the woman when you walked into the store (so you feel some fermilliarity with the product). But the tie-in is there.
Remember, you don't sell the steak, you sell the sizzle... marketing revolves entirely around selling a manufactured image that isn't real.
I really don't care to become personally familiar with ANY product whose last sentance contains the last three words
Does anybody remember (think it was BBC) Comedy show used to run on Canadian T.V. "This Hour Contains 22 1/2 Minutes". IIRC
Content from Ad Agencies? I don't know. We can't get CONTENT from the mass news media...repetition, propaganda. and plenty of bull, but meaningful content is in serious short supply anywhere.
"Never try to teach a pig to sing. It simply wastes your time and truely annoys the pig"
I never saw an ad. Adblock is my friend ...
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
... I will tell you that it isn't dead.
I have a minor in marketing and have been invovled in marketing in some form or another since the age of 16 (I'm 24).
There are different types of marketing, direct marketing and "top of mind" marketing.
Direct marketing is designed to generate sales or leads. Top of mind advertising, sometimes called branding, is more modest but designed to have the potential customers keep the brand or company in the top of their mind. Budweiser commercials are a good example. Seeing a Bud ad isn't going to make you go to their site and order beer, or run out to their store to buy a 6-pack. But it will keep their brand, image, and logo in the back of your mind so that next time you have a choice of beer, you will possibly try Bud.
Also, if mass marketing is dead, why are billions spent on it a year?
Now, I agree that newer, more innovative and more inventive types of advertising is coming about which I think is due to complaceny and becoming jaded at seeing so many ads all the time. Also since people are starting to interact with their media and not just sit and watch or listen to a broadcast this has forced those wanting to promote or sell to evolve their methods. That is called progress.
And you are right, next to PR (un-paid for publicity from a reputiable source), word-of-muoth advertising is the best you can get bar none.
Libertas in infinitum
Unfortunately, that's demonstrably untrue. The whole point of most advertising since the mid-20th century isn't to appeal to people's conscious judgment, but to achieve an effect at a non-conscious level. Just because you don't think it's having an effect doesn't mean that it isn't.
Take a look at this, this, snd this -- the last link is to an article on Edward Bernays, who pioneered the deliberate use of psychoanalytic techniques in advertising, with the specific aim of bypassing people's conscious judgment.