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The Viral Marketing Debate

NMK organised a debate on the legitimacy of viral marketing, and its future. Find out which side came out on top...

Philip Smith introduced the event by pointing out that viral campaigns were now used by all kinds of brands. In a sense, viral marketing has been around forever, but digital technology has made it a far more powerful tool. After explaining the debate format and rules, he introduced the question: is viral marketing a good thing? The audience voted before the debate began. 75% agreed that viral marketing was indeed a good thing, with only 6% disagreeing, and 18% unsure. Clearly the Anti’s had their work cut out. The Pro’s won the coin toss, and opted to speak first.

 

Justin Kirby defined viral as ‘network enhanced word of mouth’. He claimed that viral marketing is now widely accepted as a legitimate form of advertising, pointing out that both the advertising festival at Cannes and Campaign Magazine now recognise it as such.

 

Consumers now trust their peers more than they trust advertisers, so viral is becoming more and more important. Viral is a mass marketing tool that involves profiling and recruiting influencers to spread the brand message, and has moved beyond being simply funny games and video clips in email inboxes. Top brands also recognise viral as an important way to disseminate their message. Proctor & Gamble have now recruited 250000 influencers worldwide to spread the word about their brand, and their entire $2.5 billion media spend is under review in the light of this.

 

A lot of advertising doesn’t work – audiences are too fragmented, and there’s too much clutter. Consumer-to-consumer messages are becoming more influential than marketer-to-consumer messages. The advertising industry is moving from a traditional top down model to a new viral model. Viral has become not just a valid part of the marketing mix, but, increasingly, an essential part. Justin closed by pointing out that it’s been recognised by leading industry experts for years.

 

Martin Oetting introduced the VBMA manifesto as support for Justin’s argument. The aim of marketers is to identify only those people who will be interested in a particular message, then deliver it to them in an enjoyable way that encourages them to share it with others. The benefit is as much to the audience as to the marketers, and the aim is to foster genuine enthusiasm for the brand and the marketing. The audience is marketing-savvy, well-informed and appreciates smartness; it is now seen by marketers as a partner, so is treated with care and respect. The aim is to get this new audience-centric model accepted as a valid form of advertising.

 

Danny Meadows-Klue kicked off the argument for the Anti’s. He began by acknowledging that, when used well, viral can be very effective. When viral campaigns work it’s because they make the sender look good to his or her peers.

 

The problem is that, as the audience becomes more and more media savvy and sophisticated, they are less and less likely to pay attention to viral campaigns. In order to work, a viral campaign must be genuinely exceptional, otherwise no one will forward it to their peers, but the threshold of what is exceptional is getting higher and higher.

 

He then examined the online advertising boom, and revealed that viral is a very small part of the mix when considered alongside all other types of online ads (banners, microsites etc). Most mainstream brands can’t use viral properly. Viral has to be extreme otherwise it won’t be passed on, and therefore wont work. Extreme is inappropriate for most brands. If a viral campaign isn’t effective (and most are not), it reflects badly on the people who spread it, and, more importantly, badly on the brand. Additionally, viral campaigns are completely unpredictable when unleashed – the message is out of the control of the brand - and the effects and effectiveness of viral can’t be tracked properly. His conclusion was that virals have very limited use, are only a part of the digital media mix, and a small part at that.

 

Ken McGaffin used a report he had written and posted online as an example of the dangers of viral. It was very successful – 18000 copies have been downloaded free of charge. But this led to copyright problems as others appropriated his intellectual property and put it on their own sites. It’s too easy to lose control of your message where viral campaigns are concerned. Additionally, while a real virus spreads easily, viral campaigns require a huge amount of support after launch, and therefore are not the holy grail that their advocates would have us believe.

 

After the speakers had finished their presentations, they took questions from the floor. A lot of interesting points were raised, with Justin and Martin frequently reiterating their arguments that viral was now a lot more than just funny email movies, and Danny and Ken continuing to claim that viral was too unpredictable to be an effective marketing tool, and too difficult to pull off properly to be cost effective.

 

Justin made the point that viral represents a substantial shift in the way audiences are perceived, as it’s not intrusive in the way that traditional advertising usually is. He also pointed out that brands had never been completely in control of their messages once they were in the public domain, and so viral being unpredictable isn’t the problem that the Anti’s claim it is.

 

There were also questions about whether a campaign could ever be genuinely ‘extreme’ if it was ultimately being used to sell a product, a point that Danny agreed with, although Justin claimed that it was entirely possible, and cited Apple’s iPod campaign as an example.

 

The other major area of discussion involved ethics. What is the ethical responsibility of firms to the people who receive their campaigns (specifically with regard to privacy, and the fact that people receiving email are often paying for it through ISP charges etc)? Justin believed that the concept of viral provides an in-built defence against claims that marketers are invading privacy. Because it is sent from peer to peer, it is no worse than someone recommending a brand of beer to a friend.

 

Martin claimed that marketers are already discussing very personalised ad campaigns aimed at very specific audiences, but also that marketing is an extremely ethical industry. The Anti’s, unsurprisingly, claimed that issues of privacy and trust were indeed important, and presented a nightmarish vision of the future where viral campaigns might be aimed at mobile phone users.

 

The two principal speakers reiterated their positions briefly before it went to a final vote.

 

Yes – 68%

No – 23%

Unsure – 7%

 

Still a comfortable victory for the Pro’s, but it seems that the Anti’s had at least swayed some of the floating voters.

Finally, the audience was invited to vote on another question:

Which form of online advertising do you see as most effective?

The results were:

Viral 19%

Banner 5%

Search engine 74%

Pop-up – 0%

 

 

About the Speakers

Justin Kirby started his career in the mid-80s working on ground-breaking multimedia installation projects, including the famous Herbie Hancock video robotics models. In 1994, Justin founded Digital Media Communications Ltd (DMC). DMC are the experts in planning, seeding and tracking online viral and buzz marketing campaigns for major brands, including Diesel, EA Sports, Eidos, Levi’s, Mates, Mazda, MTV, Sony Ericsson, Ubi Soft, Virgin and Xbox. They are also co-founders of the international Viral & Buzz Marketing Association (www.vbma.net).

Danny Meadows-Klue trained in traditional publishing with United News and Media. In 1995 he joined The Daily Telegraph’s pioneering award-winning internet service which he helped manage for more than four years before being appointed as a director of Hollinger Telegraph New Media Ltd. He then moved to NBC’s Internet operations where took up the post of one of the European Vice Presidents. Danny is the chief executive of the industry’s commercial trade association, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which he helped found in 1997.

 

Martin Oetting is secretary of the VBMA. 

 

Ken McGaffin is founder of Linking Matters.

About the Chairman

Philip Smith is the editor of Revolution, the UK's dedicated digital business and marketing monthly. Smith runs the annual Revolution Awards, which reward the best examples of digital marketing and business from more than 400 entries. In March 2004 he co-hosted with Stephen Fry. Smith has a post-graduate diploma in journalism from the acclaimed media school at the University of Wales, College of Cardiff. His first book, Directing Traffic, was published by RotoVision in December 2002.