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viral

Clownvertising, Terrorism, and Candy Cane Briefs

by Walter Naeslund on December 17, 2009

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.]

Is Spotify the Darth Vader of Music?

by Walter Naeslund on September 8, 2009

As Spotify launched their iPhone app, the crowd cheered. The talented SEO-expert (and comedian) Simon Sundén publishes the follwing graph of Spotify Premium sales that went viral amongst us nerds. Half us us thought is was true, and who knows, it may be.

But even if this graphic joke isn’t true, it illustrates something quiet scary. Something scary that starts with an “M”.

Let me tell you a story to explain:

Chapter 1 – The Music Industry

Think for a minute about how the music industry works. This is an industry that has built it’s entire business model around their monopoly on information distribution. Largely, the monopoly has been built on the control over distribution of plastic circles. In recent years, as silver became the new black in the plastic circles industry, the information started to find other ways of distributing itself over the internet, and the monopoly of distribution started to break down.

Desperately, the record industry tried everything to stop these new an superior modes of information distribution by trying to sabotage them with destructive and inefficient “inventions” like DRM. When that didn’t work (because Darwinistic innovation always gravitates towards the efficient), they cried foul, and tried to persuade their friends “in Washington” to legislate and punish anyone who had the audacity to use these new and efficient modes of distribution instead of using theirs.

Why so desperate, you may ask? Well – this was all they knew. It was not them, but the musicians who created the music. What they, the record industry, had to offer was marketing and distribution. And when their monopolized mode of distribution was suddenly outdated, and marketing was suddenly taken over by the music itself, it’s own viral distribution, communities like MySpace, and crowdsourced services like LastFM, the music industry was suddenly cut out of the loop, unable to provide value. And like the dinosaurs before them, their fate looked sealed.

Chapter 2 – The Innovators

But the file sharing systems, though hugely more efficient than the plastic circles, was not perfect. Billions of redundant copies of the information had to be kept on harddrives where you wanted to access the music, sharing the music meant sending over entire files, and meta-information was incongruent. Instead, thought a group of innovative individuals, one would like to take the route of the semantic web and have ONLY ONE instance of every file, with congruent meta data, stored in ONE place so that we could share it by only sending links pointing to the specific files. Then each of us could have access to all information and create a hugely efficient market for sifting out the very best. A more efficient model to be sure, and as we know, Darwinistic innovation always gravitates towards the efficient. The group of geniuses created and productified this new and superior mode of distribution. And they named it – Spotify.

Chapter 3 – The Cartel

And here, the music industry saw it’s chance. In one of the weekly meetings of The Cartel, the organisation they had set up together “to act for the common welfare of artists everywhere”, one executive stood up and said – “we can’t stop every single individual on the internet, but we can stop one company! We can threaten to destroy their new value, and claim part of it as ransom! We can regain our distribution monopoly by using their own value against them! But we have to act quickly! If more inventive companies emerge and compete, like Chilirec for instance, we will loose this last chance for survival of our kind. Sure, Chilirec will try to sue us, in fact, they already did, but that’s no match for our lawyers. We have our own people in the courts”.

One young assistant’s assistant, who had observed them in silence from the end of the table, mumbled quietly “but what value will we contribute? How will we make things more efficient? Will this not stifle competition and put an end to innovation?”? BE QUIET! Roared an executive at the end of the table. THEY NEED US! THEY WILL SUBMIT OR BE DESTROYED!

Said and done. The Cartel cheered and applauded. “If we all agree to let Spotify use our music, and let Chilirec use none, we can cut any deal we want. They have no chance to do this without us. We can use their new invention to return to the times of the distribution monopoly! We can be rich! Maybe we can even keep all new releases within Spotify and NEVER NEVER NEVER release the files to anyone else! Trying to hack Spotify and batch down these files will be easy enough to stop! We couldn’t control the data on the plastic circles, but we CAN control the data on the Spotify servers! We can even demand to own part of Spotify“! The room went silent as his words resonated through the spines of The Cartel directors like a chilling wind. Own the only source of music… on the planet.

Epilogue

When Apple realized what hit them it was too late. A year earlier, soon after The Cartel’s spirited meeting, Apple had given away their last line of defense and allowed the Spotify client on their iPhone. As the power of the iTunes store faded away, Apple tried in a last attempt to launch their version of Spotify, called iTunes Unlimited. The service was impeccably polished, integrated into their brand new Wild Cat operating system, and could play songs while texting on the iPhone, something that the Spotify client couldn’t. But what was the use of all this if they had no music. Or at least, just enough music not to be able to compete with Spotify. The number of Spotify exclusive songs and artists soared and left the rest of the industry in rubble. A lot of people said that “we should have seen this coming when Spotify restricted the iPhone app to paying premium users”. But now it was to late. The war was over. They won.

At least until the rebels on the far moon of MySpace started their indie music rebellion. But that is a whole other story.

The Hang Glider Theory – How to Survive Disgusting Domino’s Pizza Clips and More.

by Walter Naeslund on September 7, 2009

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!

See My Opening Keynote at Esomar WM3 2009!

by Walter Naeslund on April 6, 2009

Last week I announced that I will be speaking at the Bring Dialogue Conference this summer, a speaking opportunity that I’m very excited about.

Today I’m proud to announce that I will also be making the opening keynote adress at the Esomar WM3 Conference to be held Sweden this year. At the Clarion Sign Hotel in Stockholm on May 5 to be exact.

I would like to thank the programme committee for choosing me, and also Mr. Anders Haraldsson, CEO at Norstat, Sweden and Tony Jarvis, Former EVP Global Research at Clear Channel Outdoor, USA for recommending me.

ESOMAR is the world organisation for enabling better research into markets, consumers and societies. With 5000 members in 100 countries, ESOMAR’s aim is to promote the value of market and opinion research and help effective decision-making.

Getting invited to any respectable conference is an honor, but this particular one got my juices flowing a little extra. The way I see it, measurements and research is one of the most important keys for the future of our industry. And I’m not saying this primarily because we need help evaluating our efforts and measure ROI, even though this is indeed very important (there was a heated debate here, here, here, and here about this in Sweden recently). I’m saying it because we need new eyes and ears to guide our communication efforts proactively.

Those of you who have seen my talks have heard me describe several communications strategies and tactics, one of which is what I refer to as “sailing”. I use this term to describe how to harness existing viral “winds” to propell your own topics. This method is just one example where there is no way of succeeding without excellent and very fast metrics. Generally I think that the use of proactive measurements is not given enough focus. This is just one example. There are several.

I am very much looking forward to this talk, which will be entitled “Truth, Transparency, and The Death of Privacy”, and I also warmly recommend registrering for the conference here.

Communication Isn’t Everything.
There Are Also Oysters.

by Walter Naeslund on March 27, 2009

Communications strategy isn’t everything. There are also oysters. And scallops – raw in a shell, with a pinch of salt, pepper, a dash of olive oil and some lemon. We call them “Scallops Franck”, and we love them.

So, why am I writing about this in a marketing blog? Well – besides the fact that Franck has the best oyster bar in town, the story also contains a lesson in honest marketing.

This very special oyster bar is located in the entrance of the award winning restaurant Pontus!. Franck personally buys his products from the very finest producers in the world (like David Hervé) and is utterly picky about his quality. Last night I watched him throw away several oysters and scallops and even a bottle of wine that weren’t up to his high standards, products that would probably pass as sellable anywhere else. Watching him hand pick everything to achieve top quality is worth talking about. And people do.

Secondly he is very passionate about his work. His knowledge about oysters and Champagne is exquisite, but he is still as interested in what you think as in what Mr Hervé or other oyster celebrities have to say. Franck listens.

We go to Franck’s bar every Thursday, and every Thursday we see the same people hanging out in the bar. What we see are real relationships built upon real love. Sure, Franck could probably churn out way more product and keep better profit margins in the short term, but in the long run the brand equity of Francks name is what is valuable, and he’s building it without even realizing it. His mind is on his oysters, as it should be, and the word of Francks bar is spreading on its own. See – viral marketing isn’t about videos on YouTube, it’s about real value and a story worth telling.

Now, don’t even think about taking my seat by the bar on a Thursday. I have a standing reservation.

The Elevator Pitch is Dead. Enter The Twitter Pitch.

by Walter Naeslund on February 5, 2009

– “What’s your elevator pitch”?

I hear the words of my mentor ringing in my ear.

– Well… errhm… let me get back to you on that.

I wander off in the office thinking about how to compress my story into a six floor elevator ride. In my head, of course, it’s quite complex with different educations and jobs over the years, but who cares. We don’t have time for complex stories. Keep it simple. I guess we’ve all been there. But really – isn’t it time to stop thinking about those six floors and start thinking in 140 characters?

To become a self promotion phenomenon you need to go viral. The normal rules apply. Keep it:

1. Simple
2. Unexpected
3. Concrete
4. Credible
5. Emotional
6. Storydriven

But now, sqeeze it into 140 characters som that it’s microbloggable and sms:able. Post your self-promotion 140 in a comment here, and we’ll see if we’ll hire you.

I guess this means that this post is too long already.

Virals, Obama and Street Fighting

by Walter Naeslund on January 21, 2009

Lesson number one. Never release a “viral” close to the inauguration speech, if it’s not a spoof of it. Pretty much everything spreading fast right now is Obama in one form or another.

That said, I think that one of the fastest growing non-Obama-virals right now is quite interesting conceptually. They’ve actually created a rudimentary interactive game on YouTube on the old Street Fighter theme. Check it out here:

Is Social Media Scaring The Pants Off Planners?

by Walter Naeslund on October 14, 2008

Every once in a while you read blogs from ad people (mostly planners) where they question whether agencies can ever succeed in social media. The most pessimistic ones in the discussion refer to the lack of successful examples in the past. And sure, you could say that there aren’t many, even though there are definitely more than one (Nike+ being the one most often referred to).

But you could also say that there are infinitely many – they just don’t surface in Cannes or Guldägget because successful social or viral campaigns aren’t necessarily visible. Read the full article →

Is Social Media Scaring The Pants Off Planners?

by Walter Naeslund on October 6, 2008

But you could also say that there are infinitely many – they just don’t surface in Cannes or Guldägget because successful social or viral campaigns aren’t necessarily visible.

One of these writers referred to a quote from The Big Kahuna: “As soon as you lay your hands on a conversation, to steer it, it’s not a conversation anymore. It’s a pitch.” But who said anything about steering conversations? What about being the subject of conversations instead? Or being the facilitator of conversation?

Back in the day, word of mouth used to be the main channel of communication. But then we got mass media, and suddenly we stopped listening, just because we had a loud enough speaker system. We couldn’t steer the conversation perhaps, but we could drown the conversation by speaking loudly.

Then along came social media. People got their voice back, and with an unprecedented efficiency. We are back to where we started. Word of mouth is back. Along with posts, comments, tweets and reviews. Can we steer the conversation? Hell no. But we can be interesting. We can offer incentives in the form of emotional payoffs, humor, utility, and exclusiveness. And more. If you stay tuned.

viral

Clownvertising, Terrorism, and Candy Cane Briefs

Similar Posts:

Is Spotify the Darth Vader of Music?

Chapter 1 – The Music Industry

Chapter 2 – The Innovators

Chapter 3 – The Cartel

Epilogue

Similar Posts:

See My Opening Keynote at Esomar WM3 2009!

Similar Posts:

Communication Isn’t Everything.
There Are Also Oysters.

Similar Posts:

The Elevator Pitch is Dead. Enter The Twitter Pitch.

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