Ker-Ching: The Viral Days Are Over

One of the biggest challenges facing marketers in 2016 is reach. More importantly, reach to customers with a relevant message or solution that will deliver business KPIs.

The myriad of platforms, channels and media means it’s never been more difficult to cut through, yet budgets continue to shrink as demands increase. We create work to be PR-friendly or social-led, reliant on savvy media insight, but with a new string to our bow in the shape of media buying in order to hit the bullseye.

The viral days are over, marketing creative is rarely pure enough to catch fire and ignite a global audience without being lit by paid media. In the past 12 months how many platforms or well-known campaigns, films or pre-rolls have gone viral without a significant media budget behind them? As American science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein put it: “One man's 'magic' is another man's engineering”. And engineered they are.

Super Bowl sensations such as Mountain Dew's PuppyMonkeyBaby [above], Doritos, T-Mobile and even Volvo Trucks’ much-lauded work [eg. Epic Split] all needed a dollar to reach tipping point. Sure, there are occasional breakthroughs, hasan & partners created a global social hit with its Lemmy tribute for Valio Milk [below], following the Motorhead front man’s untimely passing. There was zero media spend but it took advantage of the timing, the cult of celebrity and a sensitive production. It amassed millions of views and shares within days.

So what can digital agencies and their clients do for their work to succeed in the next 12 months? It firstly requires a new attitude towards the use of social media to seed campaigns. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter should be taken as seriously as traditional media buying and celebrity endorsements. But it’s not just a case of paying to promote in order to drive up the engagement.

Here’re three considerations to ensure campaigns reach, excite and engage audiences:

1) Make the media platform part of the concept

To get the most bang for your buck on media spend, make sure the platform works for the concept. It’s not just a placement for your message, done right it makes your story stronger and creates an organic reach.

We created a campaign for the vodka brand Wyborowa with Facebook influencer Jon Paul Piques as our guinea pig [above]. It’s a human version of Snake, the popular 90s Nokia game. Piques had to keep moving and try not to cross his own path for three days, using a GPS-based app we built to monitor his progress. Not only was he a brand ambassador and content creator, he helped us achieve substantial reach direct to a highly-relevant audience thanks to his huge number of followers.

2) Focus your energy

Define and understand your target audiences’ key digital and social media platform. There are so many that it’s better to focus on the most important to maximise efforts.

Ask yourself how they behave and what your role could be in their stream of daily content. Can you make your brand relevant on that platform? Then focus your energy on that before you expand and try to get everything right. If you’re not able to engage or entertain then you are wasting effort.

3) Stand for something

To maximise reach you must enter consumers' social media streams with relevant content over and over again. But these campaigns must have a consistent message, a relevant cultural connection that drives the content and the conversations.

Take Axe (Lynx) and the anti-political-correctness movement it pushes [above], or Dove which represents the total opposite [below]. Both have a clear identity that consumers recognise and all external brand communications use this consistent voice.

2016 needs to be the year that brands and clients no longer see social media as a separate entity, a place best left to the community managers to earn engagement with customers or to simply push ads via pay-per-click. By combining engaging content that’s carefully curated and disseminated, with a serious attitude to budget and spend, a viral campaign is more within grasp than ever before.  

Viral isn’t dead, it’s just no longer free.