Nothing makes me cringe more than when a client says “give me a viral”.

Actually, one thing makes me cringe more…when a client says they want a viral because last week no less than five of their friends sent them the same cool internet video or game.

So they want to be next. All you have to do is create something cool and with the press of a button…BAM!!!! Millions of people are sending it to each other, it gets posted on You Tube and receives millions of hits and all of this success creates so much buzz that it’s featured on the Today Show where Matt Lauer tells of its greatness and how it has changed pop culture forever.

It’s a wonderful story….the key word being “story”. Do these things happen – yes. However, people also win the lottery but that doesn’t mean it’s a good bet.

For every one great viral story, there are 100,000 or a million failures. The reason why you haven’t heard of those is that no one forwarded them to your inbox…hence the whole failure thing.

Does that mean viral is useless? Definitely not.

Viral helps an existing campaign – provides incremental value to its success. Sometimes it can increase participants by 10% to 20%. True – not quite as sexy as the first story I told but any time you can get a results lift of 10 to 20% relying on word of mouth rather than an incremental ad spend, that’s a success.

So when you’re at the marketing dinner table I’d pass on the daily Viral Entrée and order a Promotion with a side of Viral, it’s a much more filling meal.

Filed under: Latest Postings on October 24th, 2007