hyalineskies

Viral: it’s the biggest buzzword in advertising today, the driving force behind the long tail and the idea of the social web. A viral explosion can generate instant mass influence, sell tons of products, cripple servers with traffic, and cause an excessive amount of buzz by itself. Having your campaign become a viral phenomenon also cuts necessary advertising costs dramatically; the campaign assets — and thus the core message — are distributed exponentially in a peer-to-peer fashion. It is a client’s dream: everyone is talking about your brand and buying your product. For an ad agency, a campaign with a viral following is orgasmic: it gives you a much larger audience with little effort, and draws widespread industry attention to the agency’s work.

Because of these side effects of viral marketing, everyone is doing it. Everyone talks about their ad campaigns “going viral”, and plenty throw material onto YouTube, MySpace, and other socially-driven sites hoping that their material will be picked up and projected into pop culture. Nearly everyone wanting viral campaigns misses the point.

Good viral versus bad viral

If you analyse most of the characteristics of a good viral marketing campaign, you’ll notice that the common glue is exception: the best viral material is offbeat, decidedly individual, and entirely unique. In many of these campaigns, brand identity takes a back burner to the viral exception, nearly opposite traditional advertising methods. Cult phenomenon Snakes on a Plane got thrown into the viral atmosphere thanks to its exceptionally stupid premise and self-deprecating title. Burger King’s oft-copied viral pioneer Subservient Chicken campaign had at its source an eerily-realistic, webcam-style view of a deranged man in a chicken suit, willing to do whatever was asked of him. Nike’s viral video featuring Ronaldinho, Touch of Gold, gave a handheld-camera style view of an absolutely impossible feat. At the core of all of these successful viral campaigns was an exception: something existed that gave it a user-created feel and a “dude, you have to see this” edge. The primary message of product promotion and brand identity generally takes a back seat, and from there the meme spreads.

Not all viral campaigns can work out in the favour of the brand. If you build the exception and forget to nail down the content’s message, the end result is disastrous. A month or so ago, we saw Grey San Francisco’s attempt at an iPod counterculture campaign cause an industry counter-revolution, eventually leading them to change their misguided campaign. In the beginning of this month, the usually-cool agency.com posted a video of its pitch to Subway on YouTube.

In the video, agency.com certainly got the exceptional part right: they gave a semi-transparent look of a fabricated pitch process to everyone, but the end message was poorly refined and misguided. The video was nearly ten minutes long, full of self-congratulation, with agency.com creatives signing up to work at Subway, one making an irreverent joke to a Hasidic jew on the streets of Manhattan, and, worst of all, attempting to coax people on the street into helping their video “go viral”. The end message felt like little more than a ten-minute pat on the back, without any clear message, display of identity, or reason for ten minutes of footage. It wasn’t funny, and the exception that launched it into an ad-industry viral arena was the fact that it seemed exceptionally ridiculous, like the Snakes on a Plane of the ad agency world. Adrants called it a “hipster orgasm“. Thousands of others agreed. The point that many missed in slamming agency.com’s attempt at viral marketing is that it portrayed a sadly accurate representation of the sickness plaguing both the advertising industry and the blogosphere which clouds around it.

Infected by our own virus

If anyone is most affected by the buzz generated by viral marketing, it’s us working in media. We are self-congratulatory, compulsively trendy, and hopelessly trying to find ways to affect the new methods of consumer communication online. We witness the power of being at the bend in the long tail and wish to harness that power of thousands. We analyse these trends and desperately find ways to exploit them, attempting to wrap our old ways of controlling what’s trendy into a culture where trends are dictated by the consumers themselves. Many in the media are witnessing this loss of influence, from music to journalism to marketing, and in our desperation we lose sight of the fundamentals. We fail to look at out own strengths, weaknesses, and philosophies of communication and creativity, instead losing ourselves in the buzz of the social sphere. It’s almost fatally ironic. To make things worse, we devote a good amount of time to attempting to outdo one another intra-industry, leading to mistakes like the agency.com video. We’re buying into our buzz faster than the consumer is, and the only thing that can do is turn all of us doing something in interactive media into the same blindly naïve entities that the original dotcoms were.

I’ll also raise the asbestos wall to help protect myself from the flames: what do I know, right? I’m just an ivory-tower designer/developer with little professional experience in interactive media. I’m jaded and stupid. I’m mistaken and misguided.

I’m your demographic. In the social web, it’s the individual with the voice, and I’m not witnessing this intra-industry, masturbatory viral hysteria so much as an industry insider as I am a member of the audience these campaigns are meant to appeal to, and it’s from that perspective more than the other that I’m saying we need to tune the signal and cut the noise.

Strengthening the signal

At this point, we’ve seen plenty of viral campaigns both take to the skies and fall like lumps of lead to know what makes a viral campaign and what doesn’t. There’s a pretty set formula of social call and response that we’re all used to. Above all, the core of this viral phenomenon is word-of-mouth: by creating something worth talking about, people will pass it on. This type of peer moderation is certainly nothing new: word-of-mouth marketing has been around for centuries. It built brands like Avon and Tupperware. And, while in this viral world it’s the exception that pushes something into the online zeitgeist, it’s the core viral message that determines success in any case.

Let’s look back at the Ronaldinho commercial, which is currently the ninth most viewed video on YouTube. The message, in the end, is that its product is for the elite and those that aspire to that level. It’s for the amazing. The positive message is entirely concrete, and it ties itself directly into Nike’s brand strategy. It works, and it’s direct.

Meanwhile, Burger King’s Subservient Chicken did something else altogether. Instead of attempting to anchor a message into the viral campaign’s peculiar exceptional qualities, Subservient Chicken was left with little more than a passing mention to Burger King. However, the end message complied with the marketing tactic, and the brand tied to the campaign soared. What if Subservient Chicken tried to pull a Ronaldinho? You’d end up with what Snakes on a Plane would’ve been had it been called Pacific Air 121: something entirely lacking any seriousness trying to pass itself as somehow staid, ending up being a total flop.

Playing the viral piano

It’s in this way that building viral campaigns is more like playing a musical instrument than building a campaign using traditional advertising methods. One can sit down at a piano and mash some keys, and sure, you’ll end up with something exceptional that will get the attention of those around you, but it’s not the kind of attention you’ll want. It takes a good amount of work and attention to detail to make a symphony that is both exceptional and conveys the proper emotion to the end listener.

The problem with us, though, is our zeal for anything outside the box, regardless of if it is purely hyped noise or a masterful symphony. We love what we are and what we do, and by being trendy, we feel as if the hipster karma somehow makes us more creative, when in reality it’s just giving us a false sense of security. Let’s cut the high-school identity crisis; all of us should be long past that. It’s time to get back to focusing on what we do as an industry, not what we are as an industry. Let’s make ourselves immune to our own virus and build something better.