Duncan Watts has a theory. In order to ensure viral marketing success, you need to go mass. It seems counterintuitive, but Ad Age reports that the Australian professor has modeled the viral phenomenon and suggests that it is less contagious than we think. Interestingly, Matthew Creamer, the author of the article, extends Duncan’s argument to suggest that “influencers” are not as important as word-of-mouth marketers would have us believe. While I suspect Watts may be right about viral, I don’t believe you can write off the value of influencers so easily.

In his article dated July 16, Matthew states that “The crux of Mr. Watts’ argument is that even if influentials are several times as influential as a normal person, they have little impact beyond their own immediate neighborhood - not good when you’re trying to create a cascade through a large network of people, as most big brands do.” He adds, “Virality is an outcome, not a channel to be planned.”

Matthew, however, seems to be lumping viral and word-of-mouth marketing into the same bucket. I see a vast difference between the free lunch of viral advertising, where someone passes along brand communication to others, and advocacy, where someone advises others on the merits of a brand. I think that Duncan’s hypothesis is correct with respect to viral marketing; you stand far more chances of a viral campaign taking off if you seed it widely and support it with other advertising. With respect to advocacy, I suspect that influencers are important, although perhaps not as much as we might assume.

In order to get to the source, I did a quick search on Google and found this paper by Duncan J. Watts, Jonah Peretti, and Michael Frumin. Contrary to what I had assumed based on the Ad Age article, the paper is based on an analysis of data from ForwardTrack, a combination of geographic and social network tracking software developed at Eyebeam, which has been used to monitor a range of commercial and noncommercial marketing campaigns. Based on analysis of several campaigns, the authors conclude, “Although it was originally designed to foster truly viral spread, none of the campaigns that have used ForwardTrack have succeeded in ‘going viral,’” although they add, “Nevertheless, by combining the viral capabilities of ForwardTrack with large initial seeds, all the campaigns succeeded in reached larger populations than they had previously had access to.”

In mentioning “seeds” the authors are refering either to an initial campaign mailing, or to the practice of placing viral communications on various sites where they expect to attract an audience likely to spread the ad. Of particular interest is a campaign that was placed on the Huffington Post by JWT. The agency bought all the ad space on the popular blog for a week and ran seven different ads across the site. From 30,175 paid placements (“seed views”), the campaign garnered an additional 188,669 views from pass-along. That’s a substantial gain in terms of free exposure, but less than the exponential growth expected of successful viral campaigns.

And that should come as no surprise. As Duncan and his co-authors point out, ads that really do go exponential, like Dove’s “Evolution” video, attract a lot of attention but probably represent a minority of attempted campaigns, many of which fail to generate anywhere near the results seen by the JWT campaign. Most successful campaigns that rely on online participation also rely on mass media support to ensure that they do take off. Duncan points to the example of Burger King’s “Subservient Chicken” as one example of a successful online campaign that benefited from offline support.

In fact, most successful online campaigns – whether viral or not – benefit from extensive offline support. Farid Jeeawody, a colleague in London, recently sent me the link to this campaign for Frontier Airlines. The vote for Denver’s favorite animal (among those featured on tails of Frontier’s planes) was part of a far larger campaign including 13 TV commercials, videos on YouTube and a blog specific to the vote. To date over 1 million votes have been cast. Widespread publicity, a topic of general interest – who does not have a favorite animal? – and an undemanding task made this campaign a winner.

So what about “influencers”? These are the people, sometimes referred to as “mavens,” who others turn to as a source of knowledge and advice about different product categories and services.

I am not sure that Duncan’s analysis proves the case for their existence one way or the other. The advocacy - distinct from chatter - is specific to individuals and is not necessarily passed on to others unless the recipient knows of others with similar needs.

Millward Brown’s own research into the topic suggests that for advice, most people turn to people they know (and who know them), and most discount informal advice given online as untrustworthy (see previous post). In other words, there is considerable immunity to advice from people we do not know, but that does not preclude people who are “known” by reputation from being influential. There very clearly are people whose views are regarded as influential, particularly in categories where there is a wide amount of choice and most people are unfamiliar with the options available to them. Blogs like Engadget, Gizmodo or Life Hacker attract a large audience of people who want to get independent advice, but, again, these are the exceptions rather than the rule.

To close, there is one point made in the Ad Age article with which I cannot agree. It states,

“In Mr. Watts’ chaotic conception of the world, you might as well try to plan for a terrorist attack or some other random event….’We cannot predict what is going to happen,’ [Duncan] said. ‘Things happen randomly. You want strategies that don’t depend on being right, but do depend on being able to measure things very well. You throw things out there, with as low cost as you can manage and with as great a diversity as you can stand and then you see what gets taken up.’”

Things happen randomly if you do not plan and test, and throwing things out there risks a potential backfire. The one factor that is not considered by Duncan’s analysis is the “stickiness” of the idea behind a viral campaign, and that is certainly not immune to testing. There is no reason why you cannot pre-test a viral campaign. The objective would be to ascertain the likelihood that people would share the ad with others and it would reduce the chances of failure by ensuring people did find the content relevant, compelling and worth sharing.

Of course, this suggestion will probably not find favor with people who create viral campaigns for a living but it might ensure more campaigns do actually go exponential. So what’s your view? Is Duncan Watts right that mass marketing is the key to a successful viral campaign? And does the same thinking apply to influencers? Please share your thoughts.

Tags: Millward Brown, Nigel Hollis, viral, viral advertising, word of mouth, Duncan Watts, Ad Age, Matthew Creamer, influencers

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 6:23 am and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Print this Page