Forget viral: Why marketers still need to spend money on advertising
Opinion
They may be celebrated and claim to connect more with audiences, but viral campaigns make less business sense as they lack reach and long-term impact. Here’s why we still need proper ‘ad campaigns’.
When did it become such a virtue for marketers not to spend money on advertising?
Viral campaigns tend to be more celebrated, claim to have more connection with people and win more awards. They were the darlings of Cannes this year. Typically, they are positioned as a clever alternative to broader marketing campaigns.
But, on their own, viral campaigns may not make as much business sense.
Reach is a key metric in successful marketing. Reach is proven to positively influence immediate sales and, when delivered consistently over time, brand effects and future sales considerations. Use it!
Of course, viral campaigns have some reach. Otherwise, nobody would talk about or share them, and they wouldn’t catch. But this reach is capped versus its full potential and it comes with a greater element of risk.
Lack of consistency
Viral campaigns do not deliver consistent reach like ad campaigns. The content of a viral campaign is different to the content of an ad campaign, but both are generally targeting the same audiences and work off the same formula to connect with people: be interesting, create likeability and be distinctively branded.
Ad campaigns, by their nature, are not discreet and deliver larger audiences over a more consistent timeline. They have never worked in competition with word of mouth. Typically, they enhance it.
Much of the creative and media best practice should be applied to content development — learning from attention tracking and contextual targeting, and a move beyond reporting metrics, will all improve a brand’s content.
The most important part of brand fame, as detailed by Peter Field, is “universal meaning” and this comes when more people know about your brand and your campaigns.
By comparison, the organic reach of viral campaigns is significantly smaller. The reach rate sits somewhere between 0.5% and 5% of a brand’s audience on social platforms. At best, excluding the very few, viral campaigns may organically reach 200,000 people — which is up there with some daytime TV. It doesn’t make a splash.
Shorter lives
Viral campaigns, on their own, are also short-lived, with a faster decay rate than advertising (on average trending for two to three weeks).
When they work, they typically have a sharp and sudden impact. While this has a positive impact on brand perception, it does not deliver the top-of-mind top-up that advertising generates to maintain brand saliency across 52 weeks of the year or whatever duration the buying journey is.
Increasingly, brand discovery in search engines and social networks is driven by high-quality content, relationships and authority. This takes a long-term commitment.
Often, the success metrics for viral campaigns would be optimised ahead of this — this helps short term but hurts long term. Which is why brands that were previously described as organic brands, like Gymshark and Chipotle, turn to ads once they scale.
Less predictability
Viral hits are rare and unpredictable. In his book Hit Makers, Derek Thompson outlined the elements of success being one or a mix of a surprising hit of exposure, a perception of popularity and some cultural controversy.
Clearly, the lesson is there is no framework for viral success.
Viral campaigns are more susceptible to fraud and can slip into unsafe brand environments. This often means they need to be partnered with a reaction plan, particularly as opinions become more polarised across audiences.
They are also more difficult to measure, due to the limited time frame of them trending. This means campaign learning will be more difficult to apply to future planning.
Biggest risk of all
Championing viral campaigns above multichannel campaigns appears to put marketing into a cost bucket, rather than an investment one.
It has become “we did all this without spending any money on media”. But it should have been “we were able to take this great idea and reach this many people in relevant ways across the buying journey to deliver X and Y”.
It’s a focus on cost. This is a particular issue as marketing takes less share as a percentage of revenue.
When virality does work
Virality is perhaps the biggest glory metric in marketing. Like most things that champion a means rather than an end, it doesn’t work as a communications channel on its own. Viral = vanity.
Viral marketing works when planned tactically as part of a wider multimedia strategy designed to reach as many potential customers consistently as possible; to be interesting and distinctive to improve brand perceptions; and aligned to measurable business outcomes.
Ian Mc Grath is chief operations officer, media, at Dentsu Ireland