Forced meme is forced by Daniel Carrol

We’ve now confirmed The Soup Kitchen as the venue for our Viral Marketing debate on Monday and have two new speakers confirmed. Grab tickets here. Now, for the second instalment of our guest blog series on viral marketing.  This post is from self confessed Bronie, Dan. He doesn’t think viral marketing exists. Do you agree with him?

 

Everything I learned about marketing I learned watching a treehouse of horror episode of The Simpsons, it goes like this:

Lisa: If your advertising agency created all those giant characters, you must know how to stop them.

Advertising Exec: Well sir, advertising is a funny thing. If people stop paying attention to it, pretty soon, it goes away.

 

So with that caveat out the way, let me get down to brass tacks. Viral marketing, is it the future? well it might be, but, I’m not totally convinced it exists.

Now that may sound incredulous when everyone else says it does exist and that people rely on it for jobs, but truly viral marketing, I’m not so sure, as the idea that the marketing is effectively done by the public is ingenuous. Take the old spice campaign, now while those videos did indeed go viral, was it viral marketing? was the intention of the campaign to be popular on YouTube or was its Internet popularity a byproduct of it being good?

Now excuse the following analogy, but there’s not many chances i get to paraphrase General Ulysses S. Grant so allow it: “I can only recognise two tunes, one is Yankee Doodle, the other isn’t” and personally, i can only recognise two types of marketing, one is good marketing, the other isn’t.

To try and illustrate that point i’ll again turn to the old spice ad campaign, Now in the UK that might seem like a viral marketing campaign because those adverts were first seen by most on youtube, but as someone that watches a lot of American sports I can tell you those adverts ran during every ad break of every sporting event at the time, it was simply good traditional marketing, as if the millions that saw them didn’t find them funny in the first place then they wouldn’t have gone on youtube and showed their friends it.

In many ways that campaign reminds me of Budweiser’s “Whassup?” campaign, now that ran between 1999-2002, in the pre social media, pre youtube days, and that transcended it’s original broadcast media and entered popular use, not because of the Internet (remember turn of the century Internet? LOL AOL online) but because it was a good campaign.

True memes are spontaneous things, they’re often a reaction by a community to something they don’t agree with, just this week an article on ESPN about Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow was hijacked by a group using the hashtag #occupytebow with a meme [x] > Tebow, at last count the thread had over 45,000 comments and going. Watch the video in the link below to see just how quickly a real meme can spread.

#OccupyTebow on ESPN

And this is why I don’t think that viral marketing exists, because to attempt to recreate that is impossible, any attempt to force a meme will cause a backlash against it, look at the classic attempt to force Milhouse into a meme, the backlash was so strong that the retort “Milhouse is Not A Meme” became a meme. Really the best an agency can hope for is to create a good campaign and hope they get lucky and strike a nerve with the general populous, but asking the public to do all the hard work themselves, you’ve got more chance of rickrolling Rick Astley.