Viral Marketing and the Art of Entertaining Deceit

Viral Marketing and the Art of Entertaining Deceit

Originally a class assignment (2008)

According to Marlena Diamond’s MySpace page, her primary interests in life are fashion, dancing, drinking, and shopping. Her favorite movies are a mix of cult flicks. She describes her relationship status as “Swinger,” admits her partying is “out of control,” and has no interest in ever having children. She states that “I’m the next big thing in fashion design, and it’s just a matter of time before the rest of the world figures that out.” She lives in New York City, but she grew up and attended school in Connecticut. In short, she sounds like a typical twenty-something New York hipster.¹
    Except she doesn’t exist.

    The MySpace page, indistinguishable from a regular page on that site, is dedicated instead to a character from the pseudo-documentary monster film “Cloverfield.” Creating MySpace pages like this is just one of the many tools used in the first Internet-native form of advertising, viral marketing, “the process of getting customers to pass along a company’s marketing message to friends, family, and colleagues.”,² Viral advertising has exploded in popularity among advertisers in recent years; Salaries for digital creative directors rose 60 percent nationwide in 2006, from an average of $115,000 to $185,000, according to a survey by the recruiter TalentZoo.³
    To understand viral marketing’s success, it helps to know why banner advertising, the first widely used form of advertising on the Internet, turned out to be a flop. Banner ads do not have a high potential return rate. The cost per thousands “that a company can expect to earn can be as little as $10 after the agency cut.”⁴ They can also lead to clashing designs. “If you’ve invested a large budget in site design, the last thing you want is for it to be compromised by a poorly designed banner from someone else.”⁵ In May of 2008, the World of Warcraft database sites wowhead.com and thottbot.com (both owned by the ZAM network) went on a temporary banner ad strike because of problems with ads from ad networks such as flashy ads, ads with sound, and in one instance, a banner ad containing a Trojan Horse program.⁶ The most basic problem with banner ads is that they are a carry-over from print media, and not one designed for the Internet medium.
    Viral marketing, as stated above, is the first form of advertising to have adapted to the way that people use the Internet. As the Internet is a populist medium, Internet users generally do not like being advertised to; they prefer to discover a product rather that having it overtly forced on them. Therefore, successful viral marketing campaigns adopt methods and trends of internet cultures in order to obscure the fact that they are advertisements. When Jeffery Rapport first used the term in print in a 1996 Fast Company article, he laid out several rules for using viral marketing, rules that today still support viral marketing as advertising disguised as entertainment.⁷
    The first rule is that “Stealth is the Essence of Market Entry.” In order for a viral campaign to appear to be a user-created viral phenomenon, it must appear to have been spread by users, and not by an advertiser. Viral marketers instead “seed” a campaign to a select few influential users, who then spread it along in the viral manner. When the ad agency Droga5 launched a campaign for Ecko Unltd., featuring a video of graffiti artists appearing to spray paint Air Force One, they seeded it to various counterculture websites. Through this method, the company claims that the video, which cost $400,000, was able to gain 115 million “impressions.”⁸ Besides being vastly more expensive, if the campaign had been done as a traditional television advertisement, it would have been obvious it was an ad and removed the “Could it be real?” aura that the viral campaign gave it.⁹
    The second and third rules are to “Let the Behaviors of the Target Community Carry the Message” and “Exploit the Strength of Weak Ties.” When the agencies Amalgamated and Deep Focus worked together on a viral campaign for the Court TV show “Parco, P.I.,” they staged several events throughout Manhattan designed to appear to be an out-of-control wife destroying her cheating husbands BMW and other belongings. The events were videotaped and then posted onto YouTube.¹⁰ If the videos had just been hosted on Court TV’s website, it would have been obvious it was an ad. YouTube gives it the air of being a real event. The Cloverfield MySpace pages are another good example; besides showing no evidence of being a movie ad, the pages take advantage of the networking capabilities of MySpace, where the ease of navigating through friends of friends of friends, etc, can easily lead users to the Cloverfield pages. By using the target communities’ preferred methods of communication instead of superseding them, advertisers increase the likelihood of exposure.
    The fourth, and by far the most important, rule is to “Look Like a Host, not a Virus.” The “Rap Cat” viral video for the Checkers fast food chain never directly mentions Checkers, nor do we ever see a Checkers burger. Instead, several scenes in the music video, which had 1.4 million views on YouTube as of April 13th, are shot in the parking lot of a Checkers, with the store in the background.¹¹ The infamous Subservient Chicken campaign for Burger King, featuring a man in a chicken suit appearing to take live “orders” from users to perform certain stunts, briefly has the Burger King logo on the load screen and a small link at the bottom to the main Burger King site. The Subservient Chicken page gathered 422 million hits in its first 17 months.¹² The 2008 Webby Award Winner for People’s Choice Viral Marketing, for the LG Viewty¹³, is also brief and vague about its status as an ad. The video, which had 1.2 million YouTube hits as of May 11th, appears to be an amateur flipbook animation, with the vague title “Matrix style flipbook animation”; only until the end do we see the Viewty logo, and even then we’re not told what the product is (a cell phone).¹⁴ By subtly instead of overtly featuring their logos and products, these viral campaigns create the illusion of being user-created media that just happen to include a product (done so well with the Viewty that the YouTube user BenderPictures found it necessary to comment on the video, “Don't be telling the person who posted this they are a flipbook god or whatever because they're not. They didn't make this. An overpaid studio of pro animators and advertisers did. It's a COMMERCIAL”).¹⁵
    Another way to make the advertising appear to be a “Host” is to use websites to make the products look like actual events. The website for the low-budget horror film “Blair Witch Project” included fictional police reports and a “historical” timeline of the legend going back to the eighteenth century. According to the Nielsen NetRatings, the website was one of the top fifty most used sites in the week leading up to the release date.¹⁶ The ad campaign for Cloverfield used similar tactics. Besides the MySpace pages, they also created websites for fake companies associated with the movie, and the original trailer did not feature a movie name, just a release date.¹⁷
    The fifth, and last relevant, rule is to “Invest to Reach the Tipping Point.” In his book-length discussion of the “Tipping Point”, Malcolm Gladwell laid out three aspects a movement needs to hit the “Tipping Point”: influence of exceptional individuals (as seen in the importance of seeding), Stickiness Factor, and the power of context (in this case, use of sites like MySpace and YouTube).¹⁸ Surprise is often used to create the Stickiness Factor, as it makes a campaign both memorable and more likely to be referred to others.¹⁹
    Another part of the Internet culture that has become valuable to viral marketing is the concept of memes. Meme is a term borrowed from social anthropology, where it means “a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes.”²⁰ In the Internet culture, it has come to refer to trends and fads, especially images, sayings and videos, that become both popular and highly imitated. Popular examples of this include the Diet Coke and Mentos videos, Lolcats, and even a few from politics, such as George Bush saying “Internets” during the 2004 presidential debates, and Alaska Senator Ted Stevens saying that of the Internet, “It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes.”
    Viral videos sometimes use memes to create a connection with the Internet culture. During the 2007 writers strike, “Colbert Report” writers Frank Lesser and Rob Dubbin created the “Sorry, Internet” YouTube clip that showed various animal memes, such as the Dramatic Praire Dog and Skateboarding Dogs, going “on strike” in solidarity with the writers, and the background music is a slow violin version of the YouTube hit music video/meme “Chocolate Rain”²¹ (itself a Webby Award winner²²).
    When viral campaigns become memes in and of themselves, the payoff for advertisers can be huge. When the Ancient Greek action film “300” was heavily pushed at Comic Con International²³, several lines from the film, most notably “Madness? This is Sparta!” and “Tonight we dine in hell!” became memes. A search of the user-generated content site ytmnd.com found that as of April 9th, 2008, there were 529 parodies of scenes from “300,” with the top 10 having scored 1.4 million hits total.²⁴ That’s 1.4 million hits that Warner Bros., the studio behind “300,” did not have pay for either at the distribution end or in the creation of the actual parodies. “300” ended up pulling $70.8 million in its opening weekend, and $210.6 million total.²⁵
    Another prominent example of a film becoming a meme was the B-horror film “Snakes on a Plane.” The film itself was not a box-office blockbuster, earning $15.2 million in its opening weekend26 and earning $34 million total27, for a film that cost $30 million.²⁸ What makes “Snakes” so notable is that the viral campaign for it was completely user generated, mostly on blogs. The fan response was so great that lines were added to the film due to the popularity of “Snakes” as a meme²⁹, bringing what would have probably been a direct to DVD title into at least the profitable range entirely due to the user-generated response.
    The success of viral marketing has brought with it new concerns. At the advertiser level, its emulation of Internet culture brings a much more volatile success rate. An AOL/Google study found that while “41% [of people] thought... brands they saw in online-video ads had strong internet presences”, “The second most common thought-at 38%-was ‘annoying’.”³⁰ A study by Lada Adamic at the University of Michigan revealed another potential issue in this regard. Adamic’s study found that as the number of products a user recommended went up, the percentage of their recommendations acted on by other users went down.³¹ This led her to the conclusion that “marketers should take heed that even if viral marketing works initially, providing excessive incentives for customers to recommend products could backfire by weakening the credibility of the very same links they are trying to take advantage of.”³²
    Viral marketing has also increased the overlapping between advertisers and content providers in a manner similar to the sponsorship model of radio and early television.  As Matt Freeman, CEO of viral agency Tribal DDB, noted, “you could argue that our clients are becoming media companies themselves. They have audience aggregations on their own sites that are significant. Everybody has switched seats.”³³ Companies such as Budwieser and Butterfinger have created their own online television “channels.”
    The problem at the users end is that viral marketing sometimes, as Juliet Schor, author of “Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture,” put it, “violates the basic principle that a person should know when they’re being advertised to.” The most egregious example of this is the Girl’s Intelligence Agency. This advertising agency pays teenage girls to promote the agency’s client’s goods at parties under the guise of being a honest recommendation.³⁴ The lesson that companies should learn from these issues is that while viral marketing has high potential, they should be careful to not let it undermine the same Internet cultures they seek to advertise to. The illusion of viral marketing appearing to be user-generated content cannot work in a world in which everything is thought of as advertising in disguise.

End Notes
1. “LenaDia”
2. Advances in Electronic Marketing
3. Urstadt
4. Kennerdale
5. Ibid.
6. Hecht
7. Rayport. All viral marketing “rules” are from this article.
8. Urstadt
9. “the Pentagon had to issue multiple denials that the event had happened.” Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. “Rapcat Music Video - Rap Cat” YouTube
12. Weber, pg. 39
13. “Webby Nominees, Interactive Advertising, Viral Marketing” Webby Awards
14. “Matrix style flipbook animation” YouTube
15. Ibid.
16. Harris
17. Bradesser-Akner
18. Gladwell
19. Advances in Electronic Marketing, pg. 130
20. “Meme” Dictionary.com
21. Lesser, Frank and Rob Dubbin
22. “Webby Nominees, Online Film & Video” Webby Awards
23. Tramountanas
24. Ytmnd.com search for “300tmnd.” YTMND
25. “Biggest Opening Weekends at the Box Office” Box Office Mojo
26. Bowles
27. Grossman, Lev and Belinda Lascombe
28. Bowles
29. Klosterman
30. Klaassen
31. Adamic, pg. 3
32. Ibid., pg. 10
33. Urstadt
34. Dunnewind

Bibliography
Books
Advances in Electronic Marketing. Irvine Clarke III, editor. Viral Marketing section written by Adam Lindgreen, Joëlle Vanhamme. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Pub., 2005
Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. First Edition. NY, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2000
Weber, Larry. Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2007

Periodicals
Bowles, Scott. “’Snakes’ Fallout Leaves Studio Executives Squirming.” USA Today, August 24 2006. Page 6D.
Bradesser-Akner, Claude. “Cloverfield.” Advertising Age, March 17 2008, Vol. 79, Issue 11.
Grossman, Lev and Belinda Lascombe. “5 Things that went from Buzz to Bust.” Time, December 25 2006, Vol. 168, Issue 26.
Harris, Martin. “The ‘Witchcraft’ of Media Manipulation: Pamela and The Blair Witch Project.” Journal of Popular Culture. Spring 2001, vol. 34, Issue 4, pg. 75.
Kennerdale, Caspar. “Banner Advertising: Still Alive, but Fundamentally Flawed.” EContent, April 1 2001.
Klaassen, Abbey. “The Key to Web-Video Advertising.” Advertising Age, 9/24/2007, Vol. 78 Issue 38.
Klosterman, Chuck. “The ‘Snakes on a Plane’ Problem.” Esquire, August 2006, Vol. 146, issue 2.
Rayport, Jeffery. “The Virus of Marketing.” Fast Company, December 1996. Accessed April 4 2008 <http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/virus/html>
Stephanie, Dunnewind. “Teen recruits create word-of-mouth ‘buzz’ to hook peers on products.” Seattle Times, November 20 2004. Accessed April 13 2008 <http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=viral20&date=20041120>
Urstadt, Bryant. “How Rap Cat Made it into this Headline,” New York Magazine, July 9 2007. Accessed April 13 2008. <http://nymag.com/news/features/34473/>

Websites
Adamic, Lada A, Juris Leskovec, Bernardo A. Huberman. “The Dynamics of Viral Marketing.” University of Michigan. 24 March 2008. Accessed 7 May 2008. <http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ladamic/papers/viral/viral-market-short.pdf>
“Biggest Opening Weekends at the Box Office.” Box Office Mojo. Accessed 10 May 2008 <http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/weekends/>
Hecht, Eliah. “Wowhead and Thottbot on ad strike.” WoWInsider. 6 May 2008. Accessed 10 May 2008 <http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/05/06/wowhead-and-thottbot-on-ad-strike/>
“LenaDia.” MySpace. 18 January 2008. Accessed 13 April 2008 <http://www.myspace.com/marlenadiamond>
Lesser, Frank and Rob Dubbin. “Sorry, Internet.” YouTube. 3 December 2007. Accessed 11 May 2008 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npqx8CsBEyk>
“Matrix style flipbook animation” YouTube. 14 November 2007. Accessed 11 May 2008 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UocF4ycBnYE>
“Meme.” Dictionary.com. Accessed 10 May 2008. <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/meme>
Montgomery, Alan. “Applying Quantitative Marketing Techniques to the Internet.” Interfaces, Vol. 70, No. 2 (March-April). Accessed April 7 2008 <http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/alm3/papers/internet%20marketing.pdf>
“Rapcat Music Video - Rap Cat.” YouTube. 13 March 2007. Accessed 13 April 2008 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjfbS_Kj-J0>
Tramountanas, George A. “CCI, Day 3: Warner Bros. Presents ‘300’” Comic Book Resources. 23 July 2006. Accessed 10 May 2008 <http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=7673>
“Webby Nominees, Interactive Advertising, Viral Marketing.” Webby Awards. Accessed 10 May 2008 <http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php?media_id=98&season=12#adv_ind_viral_market>
“Webby Nominees, Online Film & Video.” Webby Awards. Accessed 11 May 2008 <http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php?media_id=97&season=12>
Ytmnd.com search for “300tmnd.” YTMND. Accessed 9 April 2008 <http://ytmnd.com/search?q=300tmnd&o=|0|all|SV|D|>