The truth about viral marketing is that it’s a giant myth.
Right now somebody is stealing a marketer’s money by promising them a viral ad campaign that is sure to make that marketer filthy rich. I have several such offers in my inbox just today.
Why, if that guy who sticks cell phones in a blender can go viral, anyone can. Or how about that crazy Gangnam style dude? Or dunking in the dark with Oreo? Pure gold, my friends, and right there for the taking. It’s a wonder we aren’t all rich and famous, isn’t it?
Of course, the reason we aren’t all rich and famous is then there’d be nobody to market to us the stuff that rich famous people need. Or maybe it’s because viral marketing is a giant myth the advertising industry has been using for years to steal money from brands. Let’s dive in.
Viral content is a fluke
To be sure, on any given day there is some video, GIF or profound epithet making the rounds on social media. Apparently, any rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah is about all it takes to get some bit of video shared millions of times. So I will stipulate that there is such a thing as widely shared (aka viral) content.
But what are the odds? It turns out the odds are about a million to one that any given piece of content will be massively shared. Here’s a link to the study that came up with that stat. About one in a thousand will have a bit of popularity. Folks, unless you are buying lottery tickets to fund your dental plan, I can think of nothing riskier or dumber than investing in any campaign that has odds like that.
That same study, in fact, found that the biggest determinant in something going viral was whether a celebrity shared it. Not a news network, not your Pinterest bestie with 7,000 followers: celebrities. So if LeBron James or Katy Perry decide your content is going to make them look good or cool or provocative (but not too provocative) and if they share it, and if it happens to be a slow news day, then maybe a bunch of people will see it. We’ll talk in a minute about why that isn’t necessarily a good thing.
The viral marketing industry is a scam
Despite the infinitesimal odds of a piece of content going viral, there is an extensive amount of peering into the whys and hows of it all. Wharton professor Jonah Berger has been cashing in on the whole thing with his book, Contagious. Here is a guy, who should know a lot better, providing “recipes” for creating viral content just like the Blendtec guy, the Gangnam guy and the Panda Cheese company.
Like Berger, the hucksters in this ridiculous niche, drag in the same small number of happy accidents that saw some brands’ bits of content become widely shared, using them as some kind of blueprint. I’m going to guess that the very small pool of examples has something to do with the odds of it happening being– say it with me — a million to one.
Viral content is not helpful
Here’s the problem with viruses: nobody actually wants to catch one. Here’s the other problem: they are often difficult little buggers to predict and control. This is why epidemiology is a very interesting field, and it’s also why viruses are a terrible metaphor for marketing success.
Viruses aren’t always that picky about who they infect, but marketers need to be exceptionally picky about who they’re paying good money to get in front of.
I think it’s just dandy that a bunch of folks giggled about Kmart’s Ship My Pants
videos, and that 70-million people saw Jean-Claude Van Damme do the splits on a Volvo Truck, but to what end?
How many JCVD fans are currently in the market for a large truck?
And how’s Kmart doing these days, anyway? I thought so.
I don’t have anything at all against tons of brand awareness, lots of likes and clicks and happy emoticons. To a brand marketer, that’s all goodness. But I wonder just how much revenue could come out of the same spend in a more targeted place.
So viral content won’t really help you, buuuuut….
Viral backlash will almost certainly hurt you
Were you one of the lucky folks back in 2015 who got U2’s album dumped onto your iTunes without being asked? In viral marketing terms Apple’s campaign was a hit. After all, half a billion people woke up to find Bono on their phones and Macs. That a very large number of them weren’t happy about it suggests there is sometimes a downside.
McDonald’s famously asked folks to share their McD stories on Twitter. You can imagine what happened there. Millions and millions of shares and retweets and fun hashtags later I think we can agree that word of mouth doesn’t have to be positive to be shared.
The New England Patriots famously found that out with a campaign that let followers create a virtual jersey featuring their Twitter handles. Without, of course, anyone looking at the auto-generated results before retweeting them to followers. Let’s just say not everyone was being polite about it.
It’s time we banished this notion that viral marketing is something we can create, predict and control, and it’s time we started firing those agencies and consultants who waste marketers’ time and budget on long shots instead of realistic campaigns.
Remember to share this with all your friends.
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BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
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