Grapevine Consulting

If the criteria for a successful viral campaign is…

• Reach a massive audience who have shared the viral, increasing exposure exponentially
• Creatively engage with consumers beyond traditional direct marketing campaigns
• Provide ROI far beyond what perhaps traditional media/marketing campaigns could achieve for the same amount

…then a viral campaign can work well.

What brands forget when planning these ideas is that a viral effect is hard to manufacture. We can’t guarantee what will work any more than we can exactly predict the outcomes of a marketing or PR campaign – at least with PR/marketing there is established methodology to follow.

It’s important to understand that a viral is not just a cheap advertising campaign broadcasting on the internet.  Although really popular ad campaigns can translate well to online activity; Sony Bravia a good example.

Most virals, whether email chains, image round-ups or a video clip tend to come about spontaneously and be funny in some way. Deciding in advance what a large audience will deem funny and worth sharing is hard. If there was an exact formula no one would ever suffer through an open mic night again.

For example taxi driver Guy Goma became a well known name due to a BBC mix-up with interview guest Guy Kewney. That was hardly a brand campaign on the part of the BBC but it was funny and something you wanted to tell your friends about and the clip travelled the globe attracting significant media attention.

But, some fantastic campaigns have been created and gone viral.  OK Go’s treadmill music video on YouTube was superb (this clip alone has over 30million views). The Dove Evolution film is another personal fave.

So what were the secrets of their success? If doing something never seen before is most important, then OK Go would’ve found it hard to stand out amongst every unsigned band with a page on MySpace.

Some people say the ground work of Dove’s successful ‘Real Women’ campaign created a ready audience for a video of this kind. But then the left-field Cadbury gorilla didn’t represent long term brand messaging and was almost an overnight success.

Rather than commiting to a list of Golden Rules to guarantee sucees, I’d rather create a list of ‘Golden Questions’ to ask before undertaking any viral activity:

• Why a viral?
  • We should all have moved beyond band-wagon jumping by this stage
• How does it fit with your comms objectives as a whole?
• What’s the best medium to achieve this?
  • A video may not be as right for your aims as a game for example, these are much under-valued
• What’s the method of distribution?
  • I can only advocate transparency here,  people are wising up to unfair practices these days
• Have you considered the worst case scenario?
  • £25,000 down with only 25 views leaves you reporting to your seniors on a CPA of £1,000 each (ouch!)

I wish I did know of an up-front magic formula for viral success, but good luck to those who are trying - I’d love to see your virals shared here!