Revolution UK, January 2004

Compelling content, clever seeding, careful tracking. This article by DMC’s managing director Justin Kirby looks at all the angles of online viral marketing and draws conclusions from the company’s wide experience of this technique.

Comment by Justin Kirby, Managing Director, DMC

The internet represents 10 per cent of European media consumption, more than people spend leafing through magazines, according to the European Interactive Advertising Association, yet online makes up just a fraction of the overall ad spend. So, long live broadband, which is playing a major role in helping advertisers to overcome their inertia.

It will come as no surprise that the broadband revolution has also repositioned the web in the minds of above-the-line (ATL) ad agencies. This is unlikely to have an immediate impact on the fortunes of online agencies as advertisers’ understanding moves at about the same pace as change in their spending patterns. But, while ATL agencies have mostly ignored the web, or at best got it wrong, some are taking it seriously. Just look at BMW Films, which is able to solicit the kind of budgets that online agencies can only dream of.

Thanks to the increase in web use which, along with the spectre of DVR, raises serious questions about TV advertising, there is a growing admission that there’s just too much interruptive advertising across all media, and consumers are learning to ignore it. Consequently, there has been a rise in the use of non-interruptive formats, such as ‘advertainment’, which enable brands to have a less overt and more sponsorship-like link to content, avoiding audience switch-off while gaining valuable exposure. One example is film product placement.

The web is the perfect channel for advertainment. Advertisers can offer (the crucial word) core, editorially-routed content to users who can interact proactively with it in real time and become brand advocates, thus providing peer-to-peer endorsement, as well as it being a free distribution channel - the results advertisers crave. Sadly, online bodies like the IAB are still pushing interruptive formats - even Yahoo! is at it with a £30K promotion. They need to look at the bigger picture.

Overall, the trend is towards consumer empowerment. Consumer-run phenomena, such as blogs and social networks, abound and the web is entering a new era. No doubt, banner-style ads will continue to be embraced as more spend is transferred to the web, just as people will still invest in search engine optimisation and search engine marketing, even though the efficacy of the former is being questioned.

But, interruptive online formats won’t have so much blind credibility as before because advertisers and agencies are now seeing them as just one way of communicating with consumers, rather than the most effective.