Turns Out Just Saying A Marketing Campaign Is Viral Doesn't Make It So

from the who-knew? dept

In case you hadn’t realized it, a new research report (that I’m sure you can buy for plenty of money) says that it’s not so easy to make a viral marketing campaign actually be viral. Who knew? Well, probably everyone but some marketers. Viral campaigns are nice if you can get them to work, but betting an entire strategy on a viral campaign is pretty dangerous, no matter how much the media pretends that there’s some secret magical formula to make products viral.

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Comments on “Turns Out Just Saying A Marketing Campaign Is Viral Doesn't Make It So”

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18 Comments
Rekrul says:

For “viral” marketing to work, it has to be entertaining, If people don’t want to watch it, it’s not going to get passed around. Also, in my opinion, for viral marketing to work, it has to have an air of mystery around it. The best example of this is the “River Tam Sessions” that were circulated before the release of the movie Serenity. When they first showed up, nobody was sure who was behind them, if they were excerpts from the film, if they were extras that were going to be used later, etc. They were mysterious and cool. So they got passed around.

chris (profile) says:

viral is the peoples' decision, not yours

the problem with viral marketing is that most of the promoting is done by people, not the media. people are unpredictable.

it’s really quite risky when you think about it: you have to create something that will be entertaining, which probably means a fair amount of expense. then you have to not explicitly promote it, and trust that people on the internet will pick up on it and run with it. that seems pretty counter intuitive for a marketing campaign.

the two latest books by william gibson (pattern recognition and spook country) feature an uber sleazy marketing firm that specializes in viral marketing. the firm pretty much spends tons of its clients money on frivolous research projects into strange internet phenomena.

Joe (profile) says:

If someone is really interested in this

If you are interested in viral marketing and interesting ideas for giong about doing a viral campaign you should read “Pattern Recognition” I think the author is William Gibson, but it had some interesting points and was all about viral marketing in one form or another.

One interesting thing brough up was hiring attractive people to “talk” about certain things when out at bars and clubs to ingrain that conversation/product/whatever in the minds of people looking to meet/date other people. Then those people learn about the subject and start talking about it to the other people they are hitting on, and it goes from there…obviously doesn’t work for all products but in this world what does?

Cyn says:

Marketing is just deception

Most marketing is just deception anyway. Selling you something you neither need, nor want, and convincing you its better than it is.

Or do your McDonald’s hamburgers look like the ones on TV and are served by smiling, happy people? I’ve never been to a fast food restaurant where the food looked like it does on TV, and I’ve never been served by someone happy to be there.

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