Viral advertisers are playing with fire

Companies adopting viral campaigns need to be more creative than in traditional media – and beware of the many pitfalls, says Ian Fraser

Warner Music’s deal last week to promote Paris Hilton’s debut album on YouTube, the fast-growing video-sharing website, may make the socialite’s antics even more accessible to her fans.

More significantly, the decision by YouTube to expand its branded, commercial content is likely to make viral marketing — which involves disseminating promotional video-clips across the internet — a more accessible option for advertisers.

Viral marketing no longer evokes fears of something horribly contagious that could either disable your systems or plague your staff. Indeed, the techniques have been embraced by a growing list of blue-chip brands, including Unilever’s Axe deodorant, Volkswagen, Diageo’s Smirnoff Raw Tea and Virgin Money.

In practice, however, there are many pitfalls associated with such marketing that can test the uninitiated.

Essentially, viral marketing — also known as “buzz” or “word-of-mouse marketing” — means unleashing a subtly branded video-clip or game on to the web and hoping it will be passed on, a bit like a virus. The goal is to create something so compelling it will be picked up by a young, web-savvy ­audience who will be so amused, entertained or perhaps shocked that they will pass it on to friends and ­colleagues.

Once the multiplier effect kicks in, companies hope to save themselves the cost of buying traditional media advertising. If they are lucky, they might also win the trust of a niche target group that would otherwise have been unreachable.

The biggest challenge businesses face is to produce something that stands out. As growing numbers of commercial players seek to promote their goods in this way, developing content that has sufficient appeal to “go viral” is increasingly difficult —particularly as competition from “user-created videos” becomes more intense. For example, every day some 39,000 such video-clips are being added to the YouTube website and more than 100m are watched.

Matt Smith, co-founder of digital agency The Viral Factory, warns that businesses adopting viral marketing campaigns need to be fully committed. “A lot of companies think they can just dip their toe in the water, spending say, £10,000 to £15,000 to produce something viral. They think they can just do this just for a laugh. But if that’s your attitude, you won’t get anywhere. You really have to jump right in.”

He adds: “Another big danger is that people apply traditional, old-school marketing thinking to the creation of viral ads. If you use the same thought processes as you use when creating print or TV advertising, your viral will not work.”

Paul Marsden, a consultant at the London School of Economics and co-editor of Connected Marketing: The Viral, Buzz and Word of Mouth Revolution, agrees. “The creative bar is much, much higher than it is for paid for, interruptive advertising,” he says. “For a [viral commercial] to work, it has to be extremely good, absolutely hilarious or shocking. The trouble is that most companies are not willing to take risks or to break taboos, so their virals don’t get passed around and fall flat.”

Anyone embarking on a viral campaign must also be careful not to upset the sensitivities of the global online community. Many members of the “blogosphere” regard their virtual world as an untainted space, where values of freedom of speech and thought prevail. They can regard any clumsy commercial infringement into their space as a form of heresy.

“There’s a collective intelligence online that can be incredibly exciting — but can be terrifying as well,” says Mr Smith.

The household cleaning company Reckitt Benckiser discovered this to its cost when, as part of a viral campaign, it posted items on other people’s blogs purporting to have come from a fictional character named Barry Scott, the star of television advertisements for its Cillit Bang brand.

After a prominent blogger expressed outrage that someone purporting to be Scott had invaded his blog, the company was blacklisted by the digerati and the blogger received an apology from Reckitt Benckiser’s public relations agency Cohn & Wolfe.

Another risk is that, unlike traditional media distributed within specified geographical boundaries, once an advertisement is launched into cyberspace, companies have no idea who will end up watching it. Andrew Corcoran, a viral marketing expert at the University of Lincoln in the UK, says: “If you find your viral is mainly being watched by people in eastern Europe, and your brand isn’t available there, you’re probably wasting your time.”

Viral commercials are virtually impossible to recall and it is also likely the creative work will end up being tampered with or “mashed up” by someone with a sense of humour and time on their hands. “You’ve got to accept that you might lose control,” says Will Jeffery, managing director of the London-based viral agency Maverick.

During soccer’s 2004 European Cup, for example, Carlsberg released an email saying: “Carlsberg don’t send emails, but if they did they’d probably be the best emails in the world.” This ended up being doctored in such a way that a version with a slogan denigrating the beer became much more prominent on the web than the original.

Subversion can sometimes work in a brand’s favour, however. A famous fake viral advertisement for the Volkswagen Polo hatchback — in which a suicide bomber rigged with explosives blows himself up, but the explosion is contained within the car — is actually believed to have boosted the brand’s image with a slightly different audience. VW was furious, denied any involvement and has distanced itself from the video.

Meanwhile, a rap version of the esure advertisement featuring filmmaker and media personality Michael Winner was ultimately welcomed by the HBOS-owned insurer. This was because it, too, had enabled the company to get its message across to a younger audience.

Other companies have sought to harness this phenomenon. MasterCard found that its series of “priceless” advertisements were being so widely parodied in the US that it launched a competition encouraging people to make further examples. Rik Lander, head of research of viral hosting company Bore Me, said: “Their attitude was, let’s get on board. That’s good marketing.”

But this strategy carries its own risk. When General Motors invited viewers of the hit television show The Apprentice to create their own commercials for the 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe, a sports utility vehicle, it did not bank on so many of the 21,000 contributions being so critical of the company, nor that the negative ones would end up circulating most widely across the internet.

THE FUTURE IS ENGAGEMENT

Businesses may only just be getting comfortable with today’s models for viral marketing campaigns, but some are already talking about the need for different techniques.

Will Jeffery, managing director of Maverick, a London-based production company specialising in viral advertising, believes big advertisers will in future create their viral advertising first, since he believes it is more in tune with their target audience than traditional advertising. They would then let this drive their entire communications effort.

“The viral space is driven by quality of ideas. Once you’ve developed a creative concept that works virally, it should be transferable into any other media, and you can let it drive the whole campaign,” he says. “How you integrate paid-for media to work alongside a viral is going to become increasingly important.”

Meanwhile Paul Marsden, co-editor of ‘Connected Marketing: The Viral, Buzz and Word of Mouth Revolution’, warns that the biggest danger of transplanting conventional advertising thinking into the online space is that advertisers fail to build an interactive element into their communications.

“Any online advertising without any interactive dimension for example, a link to an online shop — is a waste of time.” He believes that the term viral marketing is already passé. “Web 2.2 is all about interacting and engaging with people; we should really be talking about engagement marketing.”

This article was published in the Business Life pages of the Financial Times on 29 August, 2006. Read it on FT.com