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.

HP Thinks We're All Stupid

I bought two Compaq notebooks this week from Best Buy, to be shipped to our new remote office in Poland.  Yesterday, I was setting them up with all the software our employees would be needing, a job that was made very difficult by all the extraneous crapola HP puts on these notebooks.  In particular, while you're setting the machine up, this incredibly bloated animation starts to play.  It explains this application that HP has (in)conveniently pre-installed that helps monitor the health of the new machine.  Not only does this animation take approximately a month and a half to load up, but there's no "close" or "skip" button until the damned thing is done playing, so you're forced to sit through the entire feature film when you'd rather be doing productive things like installing applications. Then the app itself loads, which takes another month and a half to appear on the screen.  The application window is divided into these little pieces, each of which tells you something about your computer - the status of its battery, how much hard drive space you have left, the assessment of how secure the damned thing is.  While you're watching this thing hog system resources and slow a brand-new machine to a crawl, you also notice that each little section has its own resource-hogging mini-app.  The battery life section loads separately from the security section, etc.  If there was an "I never want to see this application again, and please don't even think about running on startup" checkbox on this thing, I would have checked it within nanoseconds, but no such luck.  This app was among the biggest pieces of bloatware I've ever witnessed - It left me wondering if HP had even considered coding a light widget before moving ahead with this pig.  It was as if they walked the halls at Microsoft, looking for the individuals who porked up Office and then hired them on a weekend contract basis to develop this thing.

The worst part of it was that the animation that praised this application as the patron saint of computer health also reminded new users in glorious marketing-speak that they should use the app every day to check for new offers from HP and its partners.  Another blogger might witness something like this and joke casually that they "threw up a little in their mouth."  Not me.  I full-on projectile vomited.

When are PC manufacturers going to get it through their heads that new PCs aren't a marketing platform for their initiatives (or their partners', for that matter)?  Some of us just want new machines that boot up within a reasonable length of time.  It's gotten to the point where every time I get a new PC, the first thing I do is create a desktop folder called "Detritus," which is where I toss all the desktop shortcuts to "special offers," "free trials" and extraneous apps that no one asked for.

We're not stupid.  We know you get "slotting fees" for putting partners on the desktop.  We know you get paid every time someone converts to a paying subscriber.  But that doesn't mean you can slow new machines to a crawl with all the special offers, HP.  I think next time I'll build the machines myself and buy fresh copies of Vista to install, so I don't get all this junk hogging my precious system resources.

Congrats Eric & Margaret!

After quite some time on "high alert status," Eric went to the hospital yesterday afternoon, where Margaret delivered a healthy baby girl. As of my phone conversation with Eric last night, they haven't picked a name yet.  The baby's name is Samantha and she weighed in at a healthy 7 lbs. 7.6 oz.Bombard the happy couple with your congratulations by sending e-mail to eric at underscoremarketing.com.

Poof!

One dead router can ruin your whole day.