Every gold rush has it’s opportunists. The gold rush of viral marketing is no exception. Before we leave the gold rush phase and move into a more mature market, agencies will keep running around waving YouTube views in the faces of marketing managers to show off how creative they are. But are they really?

There are two problems with measuring success in terms of YouTube views:

1. YouTube view count not a good KPI on it’s own. Measuring success that way temps us to turn to malpractices like clownvertising rather than aiming for healthy business goals for our clients.
2. Focusing on this number encourages cheating.

Cheating can be done in different ways, but probably the most common way is to buy views from sites such as these. Tempting if you only measure your success in views, is it not? Damaging for our industry? Certainly.

So how can you spot a cheater? Well – first you have to check out the view graph. To do this you click on the little button to the right of the view count in the YouTube window.

Second, you take a look at this graph. Here’s what a GENUINE viral graph looks like:

The graph grows organically without strange bumps caused by the mysterious parameter “viral/other”.

An agency or individual that has cheated to spice up their view count will have a different behavior. Here’s a typical example of what cheating could look like:

Especially note the major bump in the beginning. If you dig deeper into this video for yourself, you’ll see that the bump is caused by “viral/other” – a sure fire sign of bought views.

Some agencies have realized this and removed the graphs altogether to cover their tracks. Doing this however is an active choice. The graphs are by default visible. If you take a look at some of your favorite virals and see that their graphs have been removed, this is a sign that something very fishy is going on. Why would you make the active choice of removing this graph if you have nothing to hide?

So why am I showing you this? Well – I am tired of sitting in meetings where people want us to give them YouTube views. We are not in the business of clownvertising, but in the business of creating business value for our clients. This is done by being structured and creative in setting up an awesome KPI-set (i.e. quality embeds and other REAL interactions) and using that to dynamically control our activities. At the end of the day, my job is to boost our clients business. Otherwise I could as well work as… well… a clown I guess.

After a hard night out on the town me and my friend went out for a cozy Valentine’s day walk on Södermalm. We started out with pizza (hey, we were out until 6 in the morning last night, give us a break), and went on to pick up a couple of semlor (if you ever go to Sweden, make sure you grab a semla!).

But as we walk past the bakery, we see this huge commotion on the other side of the street. There are policemen, police cordons, a police car and an army of aliens. Yes aliens! Wearing strange but awesomely put together outfits with bows in the hair, bright colors, and extremely advanced fingernails and make up. WTF?

As we get closer we realize that they are also quite small – about the size of 9-12 year old humanoids.

We work up our courage to walk into the rowdy crowd and find out what’s going on.

It turns out that the aliens are not aliens at all, but fans of the seventeen year old blogger Foki, who is visiting the jewelry shop Cocoo to meet her readers and sign autographs for Valentine’s day. Awesome!

“I did not have sex with that woman… miss Lewinsky” is not a good strategy. Why? Because it’s untrue. If you think back at the Clinton/Lewinsky-affair, the big issue wasn’t really that Bill was unfaithful, but rather that he kept lying himself into a corner. Tiger Woods did the same thing.

In Sweden we have a politician called Fredrick Federley who is using the exact opposite approach. He’s being brutally honest and says precisely what he thinks about anything.

Here are some examples: He has admitted trying cocaine and pot, opposed the FRA-legislation, is homosexual and dates a person from the Let’s Dance jury, has an alternate drag persona called Ursula, parties hard and is pretty open with this in a variety of images. For example this one:

Imagine being a politician trying to get away with all this while lying! Pretty hard, right? Now however, with the brutally honesty approach he has, it all just blows past. In fact, it actually strengthens his brand. Honesty works.

On top of this, Fredrick Federley is a social media natural. He is very active on twitter and on his blog, and does it incredibly well. I you know Swedish, you should look and learn. Also, check out this amazing performance in a television interview. This is how you do it!

I‘ve always been interested in economics, because economics is a great way to model, measure and understand human behavior. In a TED-talk I watched over a bowl of indian curry (I got stuck alone in the office over lunch), Loretta Napoleoni explains the economics of terrorism and how it relates to the economics of the rest of us. One thing that caught my interest was what she refers to as rogue economics, where politics looses control of the economy, and the economy becomes a rogue force. Rogue economics “always lurks in the background” as she puts it, and “comes back in times of change…such as globalization”. This is not surprising. Politics is a system, and systems always take time to adjust to disturbances. In the meantime, the disturbance affects those affected by the system.

This talk made me think – could this be exactly what is happening in our industry right now? That the system that controlled and demanded relevance and results from marketing spend looses control when the world of communications changes rapidly? Could it be that clownvertising is the rogue economics of the advertising industry?

I sat down with a couple of our industry’s most respected names the other day at Le Rouge and discussed this topic. What they said resonated with my hypothesis. They, like me, also saw campaigns like “The Fun Theory” as irrelevant clownvertising where the client is blinded by the blizzard of change, where the strategists are seduced by the “how can we make it viral”-love potion, and where the creatives watch in astonishment as they receive the most delicious candy cane of a brief they’ve ever seen (“just make it fun, ok?”). I haven’t been in the industry as long, but according to my discussion company at Le Rouge, the blizzard of change that came along with the introduction of television advertising spurred similar epidemics of clownvertising in television. “The Fun Theory” is by no means the only famous clownvertising example. To me, the Cadbury’s gorilla falls into the same category, even though “pointless but fun” is perhaps more relevant to a chocolate bar than a $20 000 vehicle. A smaller but more recent example is “The Wall of Sound” for Brothers.

But anyway, back to the question of rogue economics. Because what we DO know about rogue economics is that the system stabilizes over time. This means that pretty soon, it will no longer be accepted to just “go viral” with irrelevant humor, and that a much more difficult task will be put on the plate of advertising agencies. In this new stabilized system, you will have to be attractive (in the literal sense of the word), sticky (in the Gladwell sense of the word), re-shareable, and effective in terms of what you want to achieve (which at the very least requires relevance). This is not easy. It will place enormous demands on the shoulders of advertising creatives and it will – and this is what I love about this change – place less crap in the lap of the consumer. It’s time to step up the game.

[Edit: Consequently misspelled rogue. Sorry about that. Le Rouge probably threw me off. Thanks Matthieu for noticing.]

This isn’t brand new by any standards, but it reminds me (and perhaps you) that sometimes, bad ass is just… bad ass.

The Subaru also seems to carry a bit more fun & punch than those german Volkmobiles, wouldn’t you say?

Thanks to Juha for sharing.

It’s late Friday. Can’t imagine a better video for an ad man to start out his weekend with than this one:

We may have some exciting news in store for you for tomorrow, so today is a non-writing-all-working day. Instead I’ll show you my favorite clip from my favorite sport, which was posted on my favorite web service by one of my favorite tweeps.

Enjoy.

I‘ve done quite a bit of thinking about how the social web will make the world a better place. I’ve written about it, and also lectured about the social web, good, and evil.

So when a talk by Evgeny Morozov popped on TED on the topic of how the net aids dictatorships, I was naturally interested. Was somebody going to put up a good argument against my theories?

The answer is yes. And no. Evgeny argues beautifully for the ideas, but simultaneously shows how the dictatorships actually start using the web to reach out and communicate, much like I think companies should. They are proactive, the contribute, they engage, and they are present. They DON’T try to cencor stuff, because they have realized that participation is more effective. And I tell you – if dictatorships do this successfully, companies should too!

Then, of course, these dictatorships abuse their power to flood the system with government biased comments and spam, and commit evil acts, but I’m not as sure as Evgeny is about how effective this is. Compare it for example to this example from the very well designed guidelines at Intel for how to effectively use the social web:

Be transparent. Your honesty—or dishonesty—will be quickly noticed in the social media environment. If you are blogging about your work at Intel, use your real name, identify that you work for Intel, and be clear about your role. If you have a vested interest in something you are discussing, be the first to point it out.

This is not a guideline that the dictatorships exactly follow. On the other hand, perhaps other commenters don’t dare use their real name either for fear of physical abuse, so this way It may actually work for government agents to blend into the anonymous crowd. Again – we see an example of how anonymity leads to evil and abuse.

Incidently, the campaign led by The Cartel to hunt down file sharers also leads to anonymization of the web, making laws like HADOPI and IPRED all the more troublesome – and also promoters of more serious evil.

With traditional tag-along advertising, we force our way into peoples homes, or rather, we sneek our way in by way of real value. This has provided us with good reach by simply paying our way in, but it also has its disadvantages – we have to behave like the uninvited guests that we are.

I would like you to commit to a thought experiment here, and I hope to get some intelligent thoughts from you on the topic in the comments. Let’s go.

The Thought Experiment

Take a look at this film, which was made as a party invitation for Diesel:

Now imagine that this would not have been made for Diesel, but instead had another logo at the end, say Sears (or Åhléns for you Swedish readers). What would that do to this brand?

Well – running it on television, forcing it into peoples homes, would be disastrous. But what if we don’t run it on television? What if watching it is completely voluntary? Would people then be offended and blame it on Sears (or Åhléns)? I think not, because watching it is completely up to you, and anyone who would be offended probably wouldn’t share it to anybody else either.

People who did thought this was cool however would share it with other people who they thought would appreciate it too, don’t you think? They probably wouldn’t share it with people who they thought would be offended (like their parents for instance), right?

So, leaving it open if this would make Sears (or Åhléns) more down with the kids or not (something similar definitely could), I doubt that it would cause negative PR-effects. Wouldn’t this mean that it would be fairly risk free to try it?

What do you think?

Telia (Sweden’s biggest mobile phone network provider) actually did something similar to this when they launched Jacko, a highly graphic character without pants walking around behaving rather… well… you’d better watch it:

Did this cause PR-disaster for Telia? No. Why? Well – because it was voluntary. I think. But I’m not sure.

What this would mean is that you could try to put out different attitudes to different segments, some very very edgy, and have it work great. It’s rather counter-intuitive considering how we’ve always thought in terms of brand identity congruency, but I think this may be a remnant of our blunt and broad instruments of distribution, and that this way of slicing your communication from rated PG to rated R could actually work really well.

It’s late and I’m a bit tired, so I’m sorry if these thoughts came out in a somewhat messy structure, but I just wanted to get these thoughts out of my head before heading out for my evening walk.

Let me know if you think that this made any sense.

Good night.

I love to theorize about social behavior and how it relates to our behavior on the internet. But sometimes I get the urge to be just a little more practical about things. How can we actually use all this theory? Before we dig into what I call The Hang Glider Theory, let’s gossip a little.

The Anatomy of Gossip

It seems reasonable to me that gossip evolved as a tool to manage coordination of larger societies. It was a way to trade the social currency called reputation. Reputation, in turn, was a way to govern collaboration between individuals where you neither had a close enough common interest in genetic propagation, nor first hand knowledge of the individual’s contribution or withdrawal from the common pool of value (stash of nuts, Mammoth meat, whatever), nor a strong enough reason to hurt or kill the individual in question. Gossip was a more granular way to control behavior so that it wouldn’t become abusive. Killing individuals for stealing a banana makes society somewhat unstable, but so does letting banana theft run wild, right? Gossip and reputation worked really well here as a way to make societies more stable, to enable rudimentary trade over time and distances, and support larger scale collaboration in general. Societies using this tool prevailed and individuals mastering social behavior thrived. If this wasn’t true, we wouldn’t be doing what we are doing today. Apparently, those who stayed behind in their caves and didn’t interact perished. Maybe somebody should tell this to marketing execs who don’t think they need to engage in social media.

Positive and Negative Gossip

If this is how gossip evolved, one can imagine why negative gossip is so much more common than positive gossip. It was more valuable to know who not to trust than knowing who to trust, simply because it was more expensive to be ripped off or killed than to miss out on the benefit some good social interaction. This could explain our approach anxiety and also why our reflexes for spotting danger is so much quicker than the mental process of spotting something good.

To this day, negative gossip dominates. Even though I can’t show you any conclusive evidence, I think we know it intuitively from our everyday lives. Just look at a rack of gossip porn… sorry gossip magazines.

Gossip and Brands

This is also true for brands. It’s so much easier to go viral on some negative spin than on some positive one. There are tons of examples, the “Disgusting Domino’s Pizza Clip” being only one.

But wait a minute – if this is built in to our minds from thousands of years of evolution, and the internet makes this kind of gossip ultra efficient, will this not happen to us all the time? Yes, my dear Watson, it will. And for that reason, strategies to handle it will have to be part of our management models, but also part of our strategic communications thinking.

How to build it into our management models is crucially important, and includes things like corporate guidelines, empowerment of employees, etc. It is outside the scope of today’s post, but I promise discuss it further some other day.

Instead, today, I’ll propose a model for building it into our strategic thinking. I call it The Hang Glider Theory:

The Hang Glider Theory

If the domination of negative gossip is human nature, then we have a downward gravity of gossip on our scale from attraction to repulsion. So what if we could do what hang gliders do and use this force of gravity to gain speed and create lift again? To nurture warm upwinds and gain even more lift, eventually ending up turning negative momentum to positive lift?

What EA-Games did to handle a bug i their Tiger Woods ’08 game is an old but clear example of this strategy. The bug was that you could walk out on water in the game, which created quite a bit of buzz in the gaming community. But instead of doing something boring, like fixing the bug, or just keeping quite, EA put on their hang glider and used the momentum. This it what they came up with:

Now, I’m not saying that creating a funny film will solve your problem, make sure you hear me now. For Domino’s for example, that would probably have been disastrous. But this film is a clear example of the theory at work.

But even for the Domino’s case much could have been done. Cool campaigns could have been created for recruiting 2 new employees (implying that there were in fact only 2 people involved), or you could have taken these two individuals in to help out with improving working conditions at Domino’s (they were obviously the two most dissatisfied employees in the country), or you could have turned the restaurant in question into an institute for food freshness and employee care, making the incident a turn around symbol. Or whatever. Just not this:

…which is boring, and guilty sounding. It’s also very similar to the “a few bad apples”-defense used in the Abu Ghraib trials. It sounds like you throw out and indict two employees without changing anything in the system, thus leading us to wonder if there aren’t a thousand others just like them out there, being just as dissatisfied and disloyal, only waiting to sneeze on my mozzarella sandwich.

So – this is The Hang Glider Theory. Try it out. Tell me what you think of it. Have fun!