I just received a viral email in which my name appears in a faux news report as a write-in buzz candidate for President of the United States.
It's pretty slick and very funny, actually, especially when the reporter interviews an old lady who flips her shirt to reveal my name as her gramp stamp tattoo. Although I was a little weirded out that it might be some elaborate virus or hack job, the segment ended with an explanation, and gave me a form to use if i wanted to insert friends' names and send it on.
Thank you, Andy Warhol. Now I'm famous, however briefly and not really.
It's a marketing campaign for a service called PalTalk, which wants you to download a video chat app that'll let you connect with lots of cleavage and six-pack abs. The mouseprint buried on a policy page explains that everyone touched by the funny viral has agreed to get more marketing, whether from PalTalk or from one of its 'valued partners.'
The agency responsible for the snippet is called Vanksen|Culture-buzz, a "buzz & communications agency" specializing in creative that drives word-of-mouth, or WOM.
Trolling around the firm's site yields other campaigns, such as one for Philips that involved faux news and video of a female robot. It turns out that the footage was believed to be real for some time, prompting questions and more pass-alongs. Ultimately, a website and video were produced, featuring actress get close to stripping before malfunctioning (she's a robot, remember?), and then presenting an ad for Philip's shaving cream.
I'm fascinated by this transition from sneeze to marketing.
WOM is nothing new, right? It's how we've learned, adopted, and reaffirmed our choices about ideas and things ever since our options amounted to loincloth dimensions and club sizes. What's different is that we've lately come to view it as a channel for which programing can be designed; people talking to other people constitutes a network that springs into existence to forward the content , much like waves arise and briefly blend, one after another, but with no structured or lasting presence.
At its most base and common-sense level, WOM is about people telling other people about something they like. It's substantive -- "this underarm deodorant really works," or "I got drunk lots faster with that malt liquor" -- and it's genuine, so the primary tools for prompting it are sampling and support.
Then there's viral branding, which is premised on the idea that there's some inherent value to inserting a brand name, logo, or mention into an otherwise unrelated (or, better yet, irrelevant) bit of content that gets passed around. Exposing people to the Coke bottle exploding as kids drop Mentos candy into it is "engaging with the brand" and good for both companies. You don't need people to do anything here other than hit 'forward' on their email programs, or perhaps invent the stuff on their own and propagate it into the Universe. Less genuine, and more entertaining...relevant to chuckles, not purchase.
Finally, there's viral for the sake of entertainment alone.
The intent here is to capture your attention, irrespective of any relationship to the sponsor; the commercial message is, at best, a 'brought to you by' tag at the end (or the frame around the video, or whatever). It's infotainment, or educontent, or branded entertainment, or any other buzz phrase invented by the agencies willing to create the stuff for you. And it represents brands taking responsibility for creating the pipeline or space in which to insert their commercial messages.
Isn't that pure sneeze?
Imagine if you wanted to have a cell phone conversation in a car, so you first built one for yourself. Perhaps you wanted to run billboards on an outfield wall, so you constructed a baseball stadium to do so. It's viral, only abstracted to an nth degree, requiring a fair amount of consumer attention before it focuses on something that might actually matter to the business behind it.
I am all for the mechanism of viral. Behavior matters, and actions trump awareness and intentions every time, in my book. Sneezing is a valid marketing tactic.
It just seems that some of this stuff has gone so far beyond the simple idea of somebody telling somebody else something that matters to them.
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