Sprinkle Some Viral Goodness

I'm starting to get tired of ad agencies trying to stake success on the notion of an ad "going viral."  It's nice to see people sharing your ads with their friends, but some advertisers hoping for viral success could use a healthy dose of realism. Subservient Chicken is widely regarded as one of the most successful commercial viral campaigns ever.  Depending on who you believe, estimates of its exposure to the masses could be as high as 40 or 50 million.  Let's not get bogged down in the details of the execution, since I've said enough about that in columns and in posts here, and I don't want to distract from the real issue - potential exposure.  Even after tens of millions of interactions with the chicken, it's fair to say there's still a lot of people who have never visited the site or who have never heard of the chicken, and that's with interactions that measure in the tens of millions.

Now, take a look at some of the more successful non-commercial viral phenomena.  The Numa-Numa Guy, Star Wars Kid and a few others measure their downloads in the billions.  Yes, I said BILLIONS.  I haven't even seen reliable estimates of the number of downloads or the potential exposure for things like the All Your Base craze, Weebl & Bob, the Chuck Norris stuff or any of the other more successful non-commercial phenoms.  Let's be conservative and say that Star Wars Kid has been downloaded 1 billion times.

Let's be gracious and say that Subservient Chicken has 50 million visits.  In terms of raw exposure, some kid swinging a golf ball retriever around like a lightsaber has 50 times the potential exposure of Subservient Chicken.  I'm not counting anything like the PR that Subservient Chicken generated, but I'm also not counting anything beyond the download of the original Star Wars Kid video.  And yes, I realize I'm comparing downloads to site visits.  If we wanted to crack open that can of worms, I'm sure a more scientific exploration would further expose the chasm between the non-commercial stuff and commercial ad campaigns.

A fairly recent viral video called "Bride has Massive Hair Wig Out" turned out to be a commercial promotion for Unilever.  It got some great exposure from a viral standpoint, but were only talking about a couple million views on YouTube.  We're orders of magnitude away from the success achieved by non-commercial players.  For most of WigOut's life online, it didn't carry the stigma normally associated with commercial viral campaigns, as the connection between the video and Unilever wasn't disclosed from the beginning.

My point in posting about all of this is that odds are overwhelmingly against advertisers who want viral success as a portion of their online programs.  Thus, a viral strategy certainly shouldn't be the only thing that builds exposure to an ad or video.  There needs to be something a bit more concrete to help build exposure, like an online ad campaign.

Even if your online videos are compelling and they get exposure in all the right places from fans of your brand, the numbers are overwhelming against your success.  Don't rely solely on viral juju to get you to your target audience.

I've Been Through the Desert on a Horse With No Name...

I mentioned earlier that Kevin Ryan and I went out on some rental ATVs outside Las Vegas.  We did get quite lost.  I think it was when we saw this sign that we realized we were in pretty deep. We called the rental place and explained we were off track.  They had no idea where we had ended up, but told us to follow the highway.  Once we found the highway, we followed it and met up with a guy from the rental place who had taken out a van looking for us.  Just in time, too.  We were nearly out of gas and found out later we were eight miles off course.

Back from iMedia Breakthrough

Breakthrough was pretty intense, but I'm back in the office chugging away once again.  Some highlights: Good things

1. Updates on what's going on in the advergaming and in-game marketing sectors, particularly the stuff from DoubleFusion.  Dynamically inserting Jeep vehicles into connected console games, anyone?
2. Refresher courses on the mobile space.  Most mobile advertising providers are still talking about potential usage rather than actual usage, but at least we have an update on the numbers.  Networks seem to be making headway, and to my mind, that's one of the only ways to get scale behind mobile web because it would be tough for a single content site to be able to deliver the numbers mass marketers are looking for.  Notable exceptions are Yahoo, ESPN and a handful of others.
3. Bob Garfield's Chaos 2.0 talk.  Man, that guy can be funny when he wants to be.  I think people are still whispering about that reference to Sir Martin "chasing skirt."  Joking aside, Garfield is serious about the collapse of traditional media models and has fired yet another warning shot that will hopefully motivate all of us to get our butts into gear with respect to developing compelling programs that can absorb some of the dollars coming out of TV spending.

Not So Good Things

1. Sponsored presentations.  The good news is that the vendors who are listening (e.g. ESPN, Sprint) are creating better presentations that aren't simply "Here's who we are and here's what we do..."  Not even these good presentations, however, can make up for the suckitude of the bad ones.  We won't name names.
2. Activities.  Wine tasting?  Hoover Dam tours?  No offense to the iMedia crew, but some of the more insane among us want group activities that - how shall I put this? - take advantage of the environment.  Kevin Ryan and I didn't pass up the chance to fire real machine guns or plunge off cliffs on rented ATVs.  That's more like it.
3. "Speed Dating."  What's not to like about a few dozen one-minute meetings with media and tech vendors?  I was barely able to give a business card and run down the client list before the bell rang and the rep had to move on, that's what.

All in all, though, it was a great summit.  Terrific location, awesome networking opportunities, and fun with industry friends.

Where Are They Now?

I have no idea why, but this morning, I kept thinking about some of the regulars on the old O-A List and what they might be doing today.  In particular, there was this lawyer named Mark Welch who used to do a lot of consumer advocacy work, ranting against spam and privacy abuses on a regular basis.  He had a spectacular meltdown on the list one day and I have no idea what he's up to these days. And what about some of the other regulars, like Greg Bulmash, Donna Dolezal Zelzer, Sanford Carr and folks like that?  We should do a "Where are they now?" special.