Infected
The best way to create a viral sensation, experts say, is to provide something so funny or sexy, shocking or useful that those who see it must tell their friends. However, pushing the right buttons of an audience, as any movie producer or book publisher knows, is difficult to do.
"It’s really, really hard to come up with a commercial message that is so successful that people pass it around," says Russ Gillam, president of Dynamics Direct, an interactive marketer. "How can you build a marketing strategy around being viral if it only happens once in a blue moon?"
While viral marketers hope they’ll discover the Energizer Bunny of the Internet, they often settle for the next best thing: content that Web surfers can’t find anywhere else.Entertainment companies naturally have the easiest time providing such items. Movie trailers are among the most bandied-about items on the Internet. So is backstage footage of popular bands. Other marketers rely on newsletters, recipes or greeting cards to get passed around.
Netbroadcaster circulates a newsletter that offers one-click access to such footage as celebrity sightings and street fights. When the newsletter is sent to new prospects, 10 percent of them open it, and about 10 percent of those sign up for the company’s newsletter, says Netbroadcaster’s Costello.
Every company trying for viral circulation has been confronted with the same conundrum: How do you present something as cool, when the fact that it’s sponsored by a company isn’t cool?
One company took the novel approach of detaching its viral message from its brand entirely — at least for a while. It began when 200,000 members of the Lee Jeans e-mail list got messages last year directing them to one of three sites, which appeared to be take-offs of the bizarre and beloved online Turkish lover Mahir (whose own explosive popularity was a case study in viral migration). One of the Lee Jeans sites showcased the homespun inventions of a sweats-clad DJ named SuperGreg; another took us into the life of a narcissistic racecar driver; and the last gave voice to a guy who simply liked to destroy things.
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The sites were so popular that the servers of Fallon McElligott, Lee’s ad agency, crashed. It was about that time that Lee launched a billboard, TV and radio campaign in which the three characters, now billed as "villains," challenged Lee’s mascot, a doll called Buddy Lee, to a fight.
Bill Morgan, a media supervisor for Fallon, said the Lee campaign "met and exceeded our expectations" of increasing sales by 10 percent. But, he added, there’s no way to tell whether Lee sold more jeans because of its viral marketing, its traditional advertising, or because it issued nice pants that year.
As it turns out, it’s far more common for viral marketers to unleash an e-mail blitz where the excitement isn’t the message itself, but the goodies the sender gets for forwarding it."How many times have you taken a recommendation from a friend to go to a movie, and your friend was never compensated?" asks Eyal Gever, chief executive officer of Gizmoz, an online marketer. "But with the Internet, your friend can start to develop a relationship with the movie studio."
The fruits of such a "relationship" typically take the form of a discount on merchandise or free hats or T-shirts. With incentive programs, however, marketers have to put limits on the rewards people get for passing on messages, or risk alienating strangers buried under piles of virus-generated spam.