I started this post as a comment to my classmate's post on how well adults recognize marketing, but decided that based on the different specific focus, this deserved to be its own blog post. The other blog post made the point that many people fail to realize that videos are part of a marketing campaign, particularly when these videos are funny in their own right. I not only agree with this point, but take it further by suggesting that the key to a marketing campaign's success is the ability to get consumers to enjoy playing and distributing the company's advertisements because the consumer wants to for his own reasons (i.e. it's funny or useful or interesting enough to watch and pass on to friends).
This raises an interesting question: can a company "create" a viral marketing campaign, and if so, how does one go about this? While I'm sure Professor Kagan is full of thoughts on this, I wanted to open it up to the class for comments.
My own view is that even though one can create a viral marketing campaign, this needs to be done in ways that dramatically diverge from traditional marketing techniques. For example, in the case of funny viral videos, it may make more sense to hire comedic film producers (like the guys from College Humor) to run a funny campaign with or based on your company's product, rather than to rely on people within your company to suddenly "become funny." Similarly, for viral videos based on usefulness, it probably makes sense for a company (especially a startup on a smaller budget) to scour YouTube for relevant experts in the field, and contract with these people directly to promote your product in the same kinds of videos they have produced with millions of hits.
The Internet and sites like YouTube have allowed anybody to become a film-maker on a very small budget, which allows all companies (big and small) to experiment cheaply in trying to create the kind of "viral" campaign that will stick. If even one of these videos actually does "go viral" and become the kind of advertisement that nobody even thinks of as an advertisement you have succeeded. The question is how to make this happen in the first place.
2 comments:
Before CBS, I spent a lot of time with this question. I worked with clients who were trying to increase their traffic by creating some sort of viral content, whether it was a video, infographic, list, etc. There were a few successes, most notably this one: http://www.nakedapartments.com/blog/creepy-creeper/
This campaign was seen by over 3 Million people, and was geared mostly to the client's target market, New Yorkers, 18+. The success of the campaign was based on a few factors: 1) The content was organic. I was shown the video (which to my understanding is real) before it was uploaded -- from there, we secured permission to use it. I did not set out to produce it on my own.
2) The content spanned numerous genres. It earned traffic from New York blogs (gawker), message boards (reddit), real estate blogs (curbed), etc. The nature of the content cast a wide net.
3) I was in touch with the right people at the time. I had contacts at Gawker, Gothamist, and Curbed, and they all featured the video.
4) The content has 0 branding in it. It was first seen on my client's blog, and thus all people who talked about it linked to nakedapartments.com. As we will learn, these back links are the key to earning top placement on Google.
Hopefully these four takeaways shared some perspective on your question.
I'm a complete novice to digital marketing so please don't judge my lack of understanding. My question is along the same line as Omar's but more on the back end: how does a company that uses a viral marketing campaign track/follow/assess the success of its efforts. Are there certain tools marketers can use (Google Analytics/AdSense, Nielsen, other firms/software) that can directly track if a consumer who views the viral campaign actually purchases the product? This is a step further than analyzing how many sites link to the video or how many clicks it receives. Rather can a company put a dollar number of sales associated directly to a viral marketing video?
On another note, if the above is possible, do the providers of those tracking/assessment services get paid on a % revenue or hit rate basis?
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