A brief history of viral marketing
Before we launch into the hows and whys of viral marketing practice, it's worth putting viral marketing into context by briefly considering its history.
The earliest known use of the term 'viral marketing' is in a 1989 PC User magazine article6 about the adoption of Macintosh SEs versus Compaqs:
At Ernst & Whinney, when Macgregor initially put Macintosh SEs up against a set of Compaqs, the staff almost unanimously voted with their feet as long waiting lists developed for use of the Macintoshes.The Compaqs were all but idle. John Bownes of City Bank confirmed this. 'It's viral marketing. You get one or two in and they spread throughout the company.'
So viral marketing initially denoted seeding designed to kick-start the copycat effect whereby people 'catch' the idea and adopt it by seeing it adopted by others.
The term cropped up again in a 1996 Fast Company article7 by Harvard Business School professor Jeffrey Rayport.
Another noted use of the term was made by Steve Jurvetson and Tim Draper from Silicon Valley venture capitalists Draper Fisher Jurvetson who invested in Hotmail. In 1997, Jurvetson and Draper wrote a White Paper8 describing the high-profile Hotmail phenomenon, hence the frequent attribution of the term to Jurvetson and Draper.
Wherever the term came from, the practice of viral marketing in the digital domain has been around for almost a decade and has registered three major blips on the wider marketing radar screen to date:
1. In the mid-1990s when digital media started coming into its own and Hotmail went from 0 to 12 million users within 18 months.
2. At the turn of the millennium when the dot.com bust squeezed marketing purses and put the onus on accountability.
3. Nowadays, as advertisers try to stand out from the increasing clutter across fragmented media to connect with more cynical, marketing-savvy consumers.
Aside from Hotmail - who simply added a short line of promotional text to the bottom of every email message sent via their service, clocking up 12 million sign-ups within 18 months from a marketing spend of US$500 000 - other high-profile early adopters of viral marketing included Budweiser and John West Salmon. The latter two campaigns consisted of allowing digital video files of cool and funny TV ads to 'escape' onto the Web before they became available via other media. This seemingly unintentional approach made the material exclusive and therefore more desirable to online users, giving them a kind of cachet among their contacts. It caused them to talk about it and pass it on in droves. As a result, the catchphrase 'Whassup' became widely known in the UK even before the planned TV campaign was aired there, while the John West Salmon 'Bear' ad has become a classic of its kind.
Although those early examples achieved significant viral spread and helped generate buzz, they were more 'happy accidents' than carefully planned campaigns with ongoing brand benefits. In fact, Budweiser saw a drop in market share and sales during the 'Whassup' campaign.9 Nevertheless, marketers started trying to replicate the perceived success of this kind of viral marketing.
Another factor driving the increased use of viral marketing was purely economic: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) projects were expensive and complex to implement and manage, particularly during the dot.bomb era when marketers were more rigorously tasked with delivering return on investment (ROI). Falling online banner ad click-through rates, as users grew more techno-literate and 'immune' to old-format ads, also contributed to marketers turning to the potential 'magic' of viral marketing in the early 2000s.
Initially, viral marketing was used predominantly as a standalone marketing tactic focusing on the creative material which could be a photoshopped image, online game, digital video clip, or even text (jokes, anecdotes, excerpts from reality TV show transcripts, etc.).This tactical use of viral marketing was, and still is, very hit-and-miss; it relies entirely on the creative material or 'agent' alone striking a chord with users. And as the amount of (often mediocre) viral-wannabe material increased, the clutter made it more difficult for campaigns to stand out.
By 2002, brands and practitioners at the forefront of viral marketing realized that the viral agent within a campaign needed to be used as a means to an end, rather than simply as an end in itself. Accordingly, some companies refined their approach to viral marketing, putting the emphasis on strategic use and long-term benefits.
The viral marketing arena has developed in various other ways since
2002. Most notably:
■ The development and increasing adoption of digital technologies such as broadband have enabled people to enjoy richer online content, making the Internet not simply a practical medium for activities such as research and shopping, but also a burgeoning entertainment medium. Rising user demand for online entertainment has spawned a parallel rise in the emergence of both mainstream and underground websites dedicated to providing entertainment content.
■ Brands have now realized that in order to achieve their objectives they must invest more realistic budgets in the strategic planning and implementation of viral marketing campaigns - Toyota, for example, in 2004 committed a US$10 million budget to viral marketing alone.10
■ Marketers have learned that to stand out from the growing clutter of wannabe viral campaigns, they must be more groundbreaking and creative in their use of digital media (see Subservient Chicken case study on p. 102).
■ Over time, as we shall see from some of the case studies later in this chapter, viral marketing has evolved into a technique that can now be used successfully not only to create a buzz about a brand or product, but also to help generate sales.
Continue reading here: Branded promotional games
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