Unintentional Advertising
Let’s assume that one of the UK’s largest broadcast networks like iTV decided to stop all advertising efforts for Britain’s Got Talent. Would they cross their fingers and hope people talked about the shows around the water cooler at work? Would they hope that enough people added the show to their DVR list while it was being promoted heavily? Or maybe, they would wish for a 47 year old woman who would sing a song that was heard by millions?
Reports from Mashable show that Susan Boyle’s video is on track to reach 100 million views (not counting replays on talk/new shows, news shows, etc). What’s the implication here? Britain’s Got Talent received the equivalent of a super bowl sized audience because they were lucky enough to host a venue with the potential for amazing content. The show didn’t even have to create it. It simply established and promoted the venue. The formula we witnessed in this situation is:
The Chicken or the Egg of New & Old Media
The Susan Boyle saga brings up an interesting circular question. Would anyone have noticed Susan Boyle if the show hadn’t advertised itself via paid media previously and built up its viewership? (Assume this was the first season) Conversely, could Britain’s Got Talent have become the success it is today, if it solely relied on the likes of Susan bringing in such a storm of attention?
For most brands, the latter choice in the above question is not going to be an option. People that know companies for selling widgets are not going to look to that company to provide content; especially the kind of content that is going to reach millions of people. This means that those widget-selling brands need to examine a few items:
- Can any marketing goals be achieved through content marketing in an ideal situation?
- If so, can subject matter relate to the target audience of your product/brand?
- Are you prepared to invest the time/resources/funds/risk needed to create content without a firm date of ROI?
If any of the answers are no, then this form of marketing might not make sense (a likely outcome for many). The mass majority of media that goes viral was not intended to be marketing. That being said, achieving it is not impossible either. It just comes down to being comfortable with the idea that it rarely can be intentional.
Driving sales or Driving Attention?
The last couple of years have shown us plenty of examples of advertisers trying to jump on the bandwagon of viral distribution. Focusing on video in particular, Honeyshed tried to drive sales through a kitschy version of catalog shopping and Doritos sought to build buzz by crowdsourcing its super bowl creative. The obstacle with these initiatives was that the goal was to drive immediate sales, not drive attention. If a company wants to drive sales, there are much more effective means for doing so.
Given the above mindset, the overarching plan for a marketer should be clear. Use your marketing dollars to gain attention to your platform. Once you get that window of attention. Create amazing content so that the attention has a longer shelf life. If you or your community is able to produce a “hit,” then the brand will reap the benefits of being associated with it.
There’s no such thing as a free “Launch”
If after all these cautionary points, a company still wants to pursue content marketing, the last thing to remember is that creating/aggregating content is NOT a free alternative to a marketing budget. Sure, it’s technically possible to shoot a low budget video that has the potential to go viral, but generally that cannot happen unless that video is launched on a platform that already has some attention around it. As discussed earlier, widget companies don’t own these kinds of platforms, so in order to establish them you need to leverage your marketing budget to create that wealth of attention. Take advantage of that paid-for attention to produce content or unique aggregation of other’s great content. If you are lucky (and viral marketing is very much a game of luck) then perhaps one of those pieces of work sent forth will be your very own version of Susan Boyle.
Last 5 posts by Len Kendall
- Promote Yourselves. Promote Others. – April 13th, 2009
- Advertising vs Editorial: State Getting Bigger than the Church? – March 4th, 2009
- Reverse Engineering. Taking Apart a Behavior, Building an Insight – February 23rd, 2009
- Big Content. Small Package – February 17th, 2009
[...] Susan Boyle, which was made possible due to her exposure to an existing popular platform. This article summarizes one of the panelist’s position clearly; metaphorically, TV as a medium becomes [...]
[...] “The mass majority of media that goes viral was not intended to be marketing.” The article on unintentional advertising from Critical Mass is worth a read! (even without David, they publish nice [...]