Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I don't see the connection between "interesting enough to make people want to watch" and "viral".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Most commercials here in Greece are so clever and well-made that you actually switch channels hoping to catch some of them. Their only downside is that everyone remembers the commercial but noone knows what product it's for, except maybe that it's for icecream or a phone company or something. So something for the advertisers to consider is tying the product with the ad, so it's memorable.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Even if they could come up with advertising that I actually wanted to watch, it seems to me that it would necessarily be accompanied by a decrease overall quality of programming. I mean, part of the problem with advertisement, particularly on television, is the interruption factor. I don't care if the advertisements are world class funny and entertaiing. I am trying to watch my damn show! The only way you could get me to want to see the advertising is to decrease the quality of said show such that I don't care if it is interrupted. But at that point, I'm probably not going to watching TV anyway. So there is no net gain.
I guess they could just have special channels dedicated to such entertaining advertisements, but geez, what kind of loser would spend more than a few minutes on that?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Because of the nature of the beast. There is a fundamental disconnect between what they want and what they can get, no matter how good their ads get.
What they want is for your primary goal in life to be to consume their product. (This is especially difficult in that several hundred or thousand products all share this same goal, and best case scenario is still that only one can "win".)
What they can get at best is "an interesting commercial", at a much greater expense than just creating a standard annoying-as-hell commercial.
They'll be pleased with the initial apparent progress towards their goal, but when it caps out long before it gets to making consumption your primary goal in life, they'll become disillusioned and go back to the cheap-but-annoying model, as it has better bang-for-the-buck.
Advertising's primary problem is that they were able to fool themselves in the past that they were making progress towards making their products our overriding concern, because of the very fuzzy and indirect nature of the feedback they recieved. As they become better at figuring out the real effects of their advertising, they are becoming more desparate to "recapture" their old progress and stature, which is especially difficult as it never existed in the first place. Until they realize that it was always an illusion, and re-align themselves to think of themselves as an investment instead of an attempt to create little quasi-religions centered around products, they are always going to have this problem.
(Note that most business people already correctly think of advertising as investment and have for a long time. It's "Big Advertising" that has a very wrong mental model of their own importance.)
If people do learn to filter it out, the advantage of viral advertising is, they won't have to watch it anyway.
With traditional advertising, people filter it out, but still have to watch it, wasting their time, their power (having the TV on), the broadcasting company's time, etc. With viral advertising, only people who actually want to watch it will waste your resources pulling it down.
I've never seen anything conclusive to say that subliminal messages work, or that in-your-face ads work. I only have my own ancedotal evidence: I buy things based on word-of-mouth (reviews, Slashdot, etc), and the most effective way to get me to buy something is to make a good product and have it listed on Newegg, Thinkgeek, or whatever store I end up in.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
full disclosure: I work in advertising.
There are a lot of entertaining ads out there, the problem is they're only entertaining the first few times you see them, then they get boring. Then annoying. Then grating. I've seen some (supposedly) good products strangle themselves with over-exposure, and the thing is, while showing an ad more often gets you more impressionable eyeballs, it also alienates the customers you might've had, had you not bludgeoned them over the head with your thirty second spot.
The solution to this is tricky. Rather than producing a larger variety of ads, I think companies should move the bulk of their content to the internet - if people are actively looking for your information they're less likely to be annoyed by it. (Please note that I'm not talking about banner ads, here, I mean sites dedicated to providing product information in as friendly a way as possible.) There are all sorts of reasons why this won't work, namely that most people (unlike this crowd, I'm sure) don't watch TV with a laptop nearby just in case an interesting URL pops up on the screen, but it'd be a nice thing for them to consider.
Perhaps I am mistaken but, personally, I do not believe that my purchasing decisons have ever been greatly influenced by all those advertisements which emphasize style, emotional needs and brand recognition over substance. I when I buy groceries, I read the labels and avoid anything that has the word hydrogenated in it, because I try to avoid transfats (which recent research has shown is even worse than saturated fats). I also check the label for details such as saturated fat and calories. I then compare similar items on the shelf for the price per ounce. I only purchase eggs them from the health food store and look for a label which says things like "free range" and "no hormones" partially becuase I belive "free range" is a more humane way to range chickens.
When purchasing a car or major appliance, I go to the library and check to see what consumer reports magazine has to say. When purchasing a computer or computer periperal I check a computer magazine and then go on-line and check to see if the product is compatible with Linux.
During election time I would never vote for a candidate on what was said in a campaing ad based on a few slogans and misleading one-sided brief sound bites. I always try to read up on the issues and canditates to at least some extent to make a proper informed decision or else I don't vote at all. To me it seem that it would be better to not vote at all than to base my vote on the emotional appeals and missleading statement found in televison ads.
So anyway, it amazes me to think that conventional advertising must work as well as it does. Does it acutally work equally well on all of us? Do we all make our purchasing decisons based on emotional nonsense? It is amazing how uninformative and usless most advertising is. By the way, I am not acutally, sure what this new "viral advertising" technique would be like
PES has been doing "viral marketing" techniques for years. Check out CoinStar for example.