Tag Archives: viral

14 September, 2010 · 9:59 pm

All Media is Now Earned Media

Reach is increasingly hard to buy.

As marketers try to sort the trends between traditional and non-traditional, online and offline, global and hyperlocal, at least one trend is clear. All media is morphing into earned media.

Earned media was typically used to distinguish from paid media.  Tools like PR and grassroots marketing that depended on some viral element to reach a large audience were put in the Earned category, and things like TV, radio, and print were put in the Paid category.  They were like apples and oranges. The common wisdom held that there was a clear trade-off between these categories. Earned media was cheaper to execute, but provided little or no control over what kind or how many people you would reach. Paid media was expensive, but provided guaranteed reach and frequency numbers that ensured the message was delivered.  The categories and the trade-off are both evaporating.

Technology and the explosion of choices have undermined guaranteed delivery.  New channels like YouTube are obvious examples of a choice medium where the viewership is entirely dependent on the nature of the content. You may get 10 views or 1 million views, but it’s impossible to predict. For every Annoying Orange, there are hundreds of thousands of unwatched puppet skits. But the even the so-called mass media are becoming increasingly choice-driven.  For example,  Morpace research estimates that almost 50% of TV viewing is via DVR, online, or other on-demand alternatives.  So even if marketers try to attach themselves to a hit show, their viewers increasingly time-shift and fast-forward past the advertising that is neither relevant nor interesting to them. The previous control over who and when your message would be seen is rapidly ebbing away.  The reach of a marketing message is increasingly dependent on the inherent value of its content regardless of the channel. That’s what we mean when we say all media is now Earned media.

Less obvious but equally true is that the low-cost perception of Earned media is also fading away.  A good press release or a publicity stunt just doesn’t go as far as it used to. The rise of social media has created more avenues for memes to rise and take hold, but also a flood of information that hastens their decline.  The competition for time and attention is more intense than ever.  So the chances of rising above the noise are less. And even if your idea does breakthrough,  it’s lifespan is much shorter because of the constant flood new work competing for the same attention spans. So even if the distribution costs of some new Earned media channels are lower (e.g. Facebook page vs. TV buy), the development costs in terms of the quality of the ideas, the frequency of the ideas, and the work required to populate those ideas with key constituencies is rising.

There are at least two implication for marketers. One is that they have to think of their messaging in terms of content. It must follow the basic principles by which we earn peoples’  interest in its own right or it will be ignored or skipped over.  This is true regardless of its form or distribution channel. The second is that they have to refresh their marketing efforts more frequently if they expect to maintain any consistent share of mind with their target.

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28 June, 2010 · 11:26 am

Getting It: Charmin vs. Cottonelle

One of the biggest mistakes that marketers make when attempting to use social media is focusing on the channel first. Many of them have been trained that success comes from tapping into what’s hot whether that be celebrities, television shows,  or urban slang.  So they go into social media by trying to figure out  the hot place to be.  First they went rushing into Second Life, then MySpace, then Facebook, and now iPhone apps.

That mentality misses the point of social media: it is not to intercept people on their way to what interests them,  it is to engage people so you are what interests them.  The first task is not to assess the popularity of something unrelated to who you are, it’s about finding something rooted in who you are as a brand that other people find interesting. And that’s where the real challenge lies.  Before you pick any social media channel, you need to figure out what makes you interesting to somebody. Sure, it’s easy to figure out why people would want to talk to you if you’re Nike, BMW, or Maxim. Who doesn’t want to talk about sports, cars or sex?

It’s a little harder when you’re a less naturally conversational product.  Even if it’s something people use a lot of, it doesn’t mean they want to have a conversation about it.  If you make socks, table salt or toilet paper, is there anything that could make a normal person seek you out?

It turns out there is, if you are smart about it. For proof, consider what Procter & Gamble has done with their Charmin toilet paper. By owning public restrooms, they found a reason for people to talk about them and with them.  In 2002, the brand team started Potty Palooza, a portable set-up of high-end public toilets that traveled around the country to concerts, festivals, and other events.  It became an attraction in its own right, and the subject of considerable buzz. They built on that momentum with the installation of luxurious public restrooms in key venues like Times Square. Most recently  they extended their idea into the sponsorship of a mobile app, SitorSquat, that maps out public washrooms around the world.  These efforts have helped strengthen Charmin’s place as the most popular toilet paper brand, and even to have its premium line cited as a leading economic indicator. They found a way to make  people want to talk about a toilet paper brand. They started by finding something inherently interesting about the brand, and then played it out in various channels where it fit.

They did not pick a channel and then shoehorn something into it. For an example of that, you can look at Cottonelle’s Facebook page. Here’s the mission of their page in their own words:

“The Cottonelle® Brand Facebook page is intended to provide a place for fans to discuss Cottonelle® products and promotions.”

There’s  no reason to go there unless you have some pre-existing connection to the brand. I can’t say what motivated this effort, but it seems like someone simply decided Cottenelle needed to be on Facebook.  They do a nice enough job trying to keep some kind of conversation going, but you can feel the strain like small talk between people who arrived too early for an office party.  It’s hard to have a meaningful conversation without something interesting to talk about.

(credit to Bill Hague of Magid Research for related insights)

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13 April, 2010 · 11:03 am

The Brand – Marketing Paradox

Over the past few years, there has been two converse trends that speak to an interesting shift in the marketing landscape. On the one hand, the benefits of a strong brand have become more discussed and desired than ever before. CEOs, politicians, athletes, and entertainers are obsessed with developing and shaping their respective brand.  Numerous self-help columns promise to help people develop their individual brands. Never before has branding been perceived as such a critical success factor by so many people in so many fields.

So these should be heady days for established branding experts. Marketers from brand managers to agency directors should be enjoying unprecedented status and influence. Yet the opposite situation seems to be the case. White papers for CMOs circulate around the struggle to get a seat at the decision-making table.  Agencies are increasingly treated as commodities, set out for bid in much the same way as office supply contracts.  Major consumer marketing companies have bypassed the professionals to embrace “user-generated content” and crowdsourcing to fuel their marketing campaigns.

One explanation for these contrasting trends is that branding has become too important to be left to the marketers. Supporters of this view argue that the limited toolset and mindset of traditional marketers has made them ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of the modern marketplace.  There is some isolated truth in this, but anyone who has dealt with a large sample of CMOs can attest that as whole they are as engaged, intelligent, and creative as anyone you could hope to meet.

The more credible explanation is that branding has become bigger than marketing.  The digital era has brought an unprecendented amount of information and transparency to products and the companies who make them. As a result, people are forming brand impressions from a far greater number of inputs than ever before.  A frustrating customer service experience becomes a viral video hit, a golf outing with clients sparks national outrage,  financing from an overseas bank results in a store boycott. So brand impressions are being formed less by the things marketers control and more by the corporate culture and its day-to-day operations. 

Branding used to cover a company like frosting on a cake. It was something you added at the end to make it look good. Now the branding is baked in. For branding experts to contribute, they have to make a positive impact on what goes into the cake, not on what comes out of the oven.

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7 July, 2009 · 9:23 pm

Word of Mouth is Not a Channel

Personal InfluenceWord of mouth is the most powerful brand-building mechanism there is. This is not new, of course. The book on the left put rigorous data behind the idea that people were more influenced by their peers in marketing, politics, and fashion than they were by mass media. It is interesting to note that the book was published in 1955, and is well-known by most marketing researchers. That is why I am taken aback by people promoting word of mouth as the next big thing.

What is new is the means to witness, promote and harness word of mouth through digital social networks.  But this does not change the fundamental challenge to marketers, which is finding a way to generate genuine word of mouth in the first place. True word of mouth happens when a potential customer gets a sincere recommendation from someone they trust. True word of mouth cannot be generated directly by a company. If it is, it loses the sincerity and trust that make it so powerful. Instead, it has to do something that makes that trusted influencer want to recommend their product. High product quality might do that, mass media might do that, database marketing might do that, great customer service might do that, a viral video might do that. These are all marketing channels. They are all means to influence the influencers.

When new firms try to position themselves as Word of Mouth agencies, the trick is to find out what they really do. How do they generate word of mouth? If they say by creating buzz in the mediasphere, then they are a PR company. If they say by identifying influencers most likely to be the source of recommendations to others, they are a database marketing company. If they say by creating unique brand experiences, they are an events company. Word of Mouth is an end, not a means. It still falls on marketers to find and use the tools they need to make true word of mouth happen.

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