Ship’s Biscuit — Flipping the digital landscape to portrait.

It’s probably appropriate to begin by defining our terms. The concept of viral marketing represents a very broad church, commonly used to describe any marketing initiative (predominantly but not exclusively digital) designed to encourage our innate desire to share the things we find appealing; for the benefit and enjoyment of others, and to express something about ourselves as propagators.

Successful viral marketing campaigns create community distributed or propagated content. Online this could be imagery, a video, an application, a game, a story, a simple document or virtually any other piece of digital content. Generally speaking viral initiatives can be categorised as:

Pass along
Self-contained viral pieces, often video or imagery, but sometimes just text, that can be attached and forwarded peer-to-peer, primarily by email or MMS. Often these pieces are also seeded into community sites, viral archives, or across the blogsphere.

Hosted
Self-contained experiences that are hosted on a website or specially developed microsite. This approach avoids the inherent problems with pass along material, and allows a richer, more interactive experience.

Incentivised
A broad category, primarily hosted in structure, describing viral concepts that integrate a direct incentive for users to alert their peers to the piece. Often a part of a prize draw, competition or challenge mechanism.

When talking about viral marketing, we’re generally referring to intentional virals. It’s worth noting that some of the most widely distributed viral pieces are actually non-intentional, or at least non-commercial, primarily due to the power of YouTube and social networking sites. One video that consistently finds itself at the top of the viral charts is StarWars Kid, whose star has made a career of fighting to earn royalties from the est. 900m of impacts his stolen video performance has received.

Criteria for success are relative to business objectives

The extremely diverse nature of viral marketing activity implies that one size of evaluative criteria can never fit all. This presents a significant challenge to benchmarking the discipline. The natural tendency is to fall back on volume reach – how many impacts did the campaign achieve? But this is a distraction. Success factors must relate to the specific objectives of the campaign.

Some viral marketing initiatives are indeed targeted for mass reach, but most have more sophisticated objectives – targeted reach (not just reach, but reaching the right audience), drive to site (requiring an action beyond view/pass along), data capture (requiring interaction), participation (in a promotion or competition) or involving the creation of associated user generated content. It’s impossible, therefore, to benchmark the success of something like the Cadbury’s Drumming Gorilla against the same criteria as Mini Adventures, or as the Virtual Bartender, or Orange’s Unlimited Web Page or Monopoly Live.

Broadly speaking, viral objectives might be segmented as those driving;

1. Action e.g. sign-up, purchase, claim, text.
2. Attention e.g. education about a cause, introduction to a product.
3. Awareness e.g. increasing familiarity of a brand, get people talking .

Viral objectives can be segmented depending on how close the marketer wishes to get to the target.

Put simply, the closer you want to get to the bullseye of Action, the more focus required.

Where specific action is required, total reach is only relevant as an indicator of the universe that may have acted as desired. A narrower sub-segment (i.e. those that fit the target market profile and act as intended) defines the success or failure of the initiative. Unfortunately, whilst mass reach totals may be accessible, this kind of ‘action’ data is rarely published for commercial viral marketing campaigns.

Narrowcast vs. broadcast

It is particularly inappropriate to judge ‘narrowcast’ objectives against ‘broadcast’ criteria. Geographic, demographic, psychographic and affinity targeting are all common restraints within viral marketing. This might be achieved in the way the viral is executed (i.e. content, creative execution or language specifically of interest to the target group), or how the material is propagated (e.g. blogger outreach vs. time-waster portals). A useful narrowcast example is the Nokia Morph Concept - a kind of gadget freak’s fantasy of the future. Commentary on Nokia Morph claims significant success but presumably (data unavailable) on volumes nowhere close to those achieved by broadcast category examples.

Of course, viral ‘targeting’ doesn’t always imply low reach. ShockAbsorber’s Bounce-o-meter has delivered over 4.4m impacts. At first blush one would assume the viral audience is made up of sniggering male office workers. But as a result of the clear call-to-action, 600,000 users have clicked to a ‘Where to buy’ page. In this instance, number of impacts isn’t really important; what matters is raising the awareness amongst women likely to go on to purchase.

There are many examples of supposedly broadcast virals whose success is attributed to volume impacts but in practice may not have been a success at all as a result of inappropriate broadcasting. A useful comparison to the Bounce-o-meter is Kylie’s Agent Provocateur viral, which achieved notoriety and acclaim when 350m viewed the film. Anecdotal evidence suggests a very small proportion of viewers were target market, and the initiative delivered minimal attributable uplift in product sales. But, of course, it did get people talking about the brand.

We’ve suffered examples of this kind ourselves. In Autumn 2007 JPMH released a viral campaign for Nestle Aero designed to promote (free) trial of a new confectionary variant. Our target of 50k trials was fulfilled within a week. A great success? On the face of it. But unfortunately the vast majority of trial claim traffic was driven by UK ‘freebie’ portals and not the targeted banner campaign (the majority of which hadn’t even gone live before the samples ran out). So 50k people tried the new chocolate bar, but not the 50k we wanted. And much of the media budget went astray, disrupting ROI.

Beyond straightforward awareness, if we have no means of measuring active response then it follows that we have no means of benchmarking true campaign success. Transport for London’s Think! ‘Moonwalking Bear’ with 5m impacts may appear successful but without a clear and measurable action, the level of success is impossible to understand. How many of these 5m people actually think about the dancing bear while driving? How many ‘non-accidents’ could be attributable to the campaign? Equally how much Dairy Milk has been purchased as a result of the Gorilla or Trucks virals?

Seeding

Finally the nature of and investment in seeding activity can also unbalance the playing field. Some marketers are attracted to viral specifically because of its perceived low cost of entry. Of course, this is sometimes the case. There are good examples of very low cost virals that have achieved considerable acclaim. But in our experience the potential for success is, broadly speaking, proportionate to investment. Gone are the days when you could send a viral to 50 of your friends during lunchtime and expect it to go half-way round the globe by end of play. Today seeding and propagation costs frequently exceed the production costs of the viral itself. Many broadcast examples, such as Cadbury’s (c.12m), Budweiser ‘Was’ Up?’ (C.100m), Ford Street Ka, or Budweiser ‘Popcorn’, take an integrated approach by simply extending their 30 second TV spots for the web, or filming alternates. High profile hosted campaigns, such as Heineken’s Coincidence, frequently include advertising investment in the media plan. Is it reasonable to benchmark Trojan Olympics, a web only product launch campaign, against the Cadbury’s Gorilla when the latter was already playing on prime-time TV when the spot went ‘viral’ on YouTube?

Access to reliable data

In addition to the difficulty of comparing success across dramatically different campaign objectives, viral benchmarking carries pragmatic challenges. There are limited sources of reliable data available for commercial viral campaigns. We are reliant on published case studies, primarily from agencies as credentials or for award submissions. These are highly unreliable, tend to exaggerate results, and generally omit key data such as budget to enable any viable campaign evaluation.

• Community sites such as YouTube or Kontraband publish view totals for simple video and image virals. But nothing exists to amalgamate such data and these sources offer no information on hosted initiatives.
• Web traffic trackers, such as Hitwise, can offer an insight into current hosted viral performance. But unless the traffic volume is high most initiatives are not covered. At lower volumes the data is again unreliable.
• Pure pass along material that doesn’t require an action from the recipient is, by very nature, untrackable. Some more sophisticated initiatives incorporate some forms of pass along tracker, but this is not published data.

Unpredictability

In practice, the value of benchmarking lies in target setting for comparative evaluation. If campaign ‘X’ achieved ‘Y’, then we should predict/target the same outcome. But the direction and speed at which viral campaigns propagate are highly unpredictable, precisely because of the unpredictable nature of the web community that has a hold on the destiny of the ‘meme’. This can be frustrating for brand owners more experienced with the more scientific models associated with media planning and buying. It is dangerous to forecast outcomes based on the perceived experience of other brands or organizations. Two very similar initiatives can propagate and spread in very different ways, leading to dramatically different outcomes, both of which may be deemed successes or failures.

Even when a viral campaign has all the right ingredients - clear objectives, a significant propagation budget, arresting creativity and outstanding execution - it can easily fall by the wayside. Useful examples are Sony PSP Rappers, L’Oreal’s Consumer Blog, Oslo Health Hearing Test, Bullet Proof Baby, Hot Fuzz IQ and Naked Mail, all of which might have been projected to succeed, but which in practice have had very little impact.

Initiative specific targets

Without access to reliable comparative data, and without the benefit of mirrored circumstance, best practice category examples can only really serve as a point of reference when setting targets for a new viral campaign.

At JPMH our approach is instead to set specific, measurable targets on a campaign-by-campaign basis. These targets are an output of;

• Realistic business objectives of the client brand
• Digital audience
• Desired level of action / interaction
• Concurrent communications activity
• Seeding budget
• Propagation model
• Capacity for accurate measurement

Considering this, ensuring that your viral campaign contains the following features should keep the chances of success as high as possible.

• Simplicity - clear and single-minded proposition
• Striking creative delivery – humour, shock, surprise, intrigue
• Ease of propagation
• Targeted seeding plan
• Measurable outcomes

ML/NM – 23-04-08