You cannot tell people what to like – the problem with viral marketing
Jean-Remy von Matt of advertising agency Jung von Matt is up in arms against the quality of recent advertising campaigns. In Der Spiegel’s new issue, he chides his marketing colleagues for celebrating themselves even when their work has been everything but worthy of celebration.
He takes special issue with everybody’s new darling viral marketing, which he considers mostly useless as in most cases it supposedly doesn’t even reach small-scale audiences.
Well, I’m no “expert” in advertising but isn’t that common sense?
For me, viral marketing can be compared to word-of-mouth advertising, but being more efficient as it takes advantage of the connectivity of internet users. Therefore it is able to potentially reach lots of people very quickly – as all it takes to further its message is an email, a tweet, a high enough position on digg etc. Additionally, it has the social proof element built in. As real people recommend a product video (or whatever context the product is being used in), people are generally inclined to check out what others are telling them about. This comes down to honesty and appreciation of real human recommendations though. Contrast this with traditional advertising: some agency making their best effort at “selling” you something. Works in some cases, most probably will not work when it involves human judgement of product though.
Basically, people don’t like being told what to like.
If it’s all too obvious that some cool product video or something similar was just made to hopefully go viral, people will most probably see through that which just disinclines them to recommend that product to friends and followers.
So when Jean-Remy von Matt talks about 90% of viral marketing not even reaching 5000 viewers then those are probably the cases where it was just too obvious that people were being played.
Why do marketers think they have to dupe people to like the product?
If you spend more of your money for product design and real innovation – not the kind that is happening in most corporations, i.e. being too timid to try something really new and exciting – and less on viral marketing, I suppose your product stands a real chance of being good enough that people recommend it all by themselves. And who knows, it may even go viral as some dude who films himself using it gets to be the latest hit on youtube or digg.
