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?"
Instead of MAKING the customer do something, you make it attractive enough for them to WANT to do something.
MPAA, RIAA: you taking notes?
The idea is that if the ads are cool you will tell your friends about them, and then they will see them and spread them to their friends, hence viral.
Philosophy.
They've already succeeded. It's been posted on Slashdot. What better indicator of sucess in a viral marketing campaign designed to attract attention and publicity do you need?
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
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.
I'm sorry, I must have got something wrong...
You're not saying some time in the future I won't be forced to watch commercials because some gizmo or another preventing me from switching channels? I'll watch commercials of my own free will?
I don't believe a change of this magnitude throughout the marketing industry is possible.
It would be nice, though.
However, I fear that if I start watching commercials thinking I like it, I'll have been brainwashed. And they won't have changed.
Ignore this signature. By order.
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.
They're using Viral Marketing and leveraging Web 2.0 paradigms to synergistically create scalable advertising solu--. . . oh bother . . . they're not even using AJAX.
Viral advertising works because it is rare. How could it be the norm? I seriously doubt that there is enough talent out there to regularly churn out advertising that is entertaining enough. It is, after all, only advertising. People will learn to filter it out.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
It worked.
Why cut IT when your office space costs $3/sf? gibso
and it will be dead forever. Look at places like myspace. It is pure viral marketing, friends tell friends and friends get friends to join. The amusing part is, myspace makes money off of the old, failed system of marketing, while myspace enjoys having no advertising budget of their own. they have millions of stupid kids out there spouting off how great their service is. it is an amazing feat.
if anyone is trying to market their business, i suggest they read "PyroMarketing" good stuff.
as a US citizen (like many others) i have been bombed and hounded by advertising for so long now that i automatically ignore all advertizing like ignoring the background noise in a factory...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
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.)
... that viral marketing just doesn't work.