Where Is Newspaper and Television Advertising Going? It’s Transferring Slowly But Surely From “In Your Face” to Encouraging the Oldest , Most Successful Advertising Forum of All – Word of Mouth

Philip M. Stone September 26, 2005

A recent survey from Intelliseek said that 88% of consumers trust “word of mouth” and 65% of consumers trust friends for product recommendations. Compare that to 56% who trust newspaper advertising and the 47% who trust radio and television advertising and it’s not too difficult to figure out why some advertising spend is shifting to word of mouth.

The trick, of course, is to come up with the type of Internet campaign that will encourage viewers to pass on the word, but major advertisers are experimenting with great vigor to discover what works. Those who succeed win great rewards.

Electronic word-of-mouth advertising campaigns – often called viral advertising – are becoming ever more popular because they are inexpensive, provocative, entertaining and, above all else, they work! Such campaigns can have as their core on web pages videos, games, still pictures or any other material that attracts. What makes those pages unique is that the viewer likes so much what is on screen that the viewer e-mails or otherwise links the site o friends, family and colleagues. Once that happens the site has gone viral, and it will continue to spread across the Web, potentially reaching millions.

Products pushed via such campaigns come from some of the world’s biggest companies, ranging from automobiles, movies, video games, beer, condoms, fast food and even anti-acid products to handle the effects of too much of that  fast food too quickly!

Much has been made of how Procter & Gamble (P&G), the world’s largest consumer goods company, is reevaluating its advertising spend away from television, so it is as good an example as any to see what it is up to in the viral advertising world.  On September 21 for 24 hours it took over the main advertising space on many key online sites including Yahoo.com and ESPN.com to promote a football sweepstakes sponsored by its Prilosec OTC acid reducer.

The sweepstakes campaign  also includes television promotion, but P&G broke new ground for itself on the web, clearly showing it is actively seeking new ways of promoting its products in an interactive manner online. It is no accident that this year P&G has fallen to the number 2 spot (a combination of General Motors spending more and P&G less) in US television advertising from the top spot it held for years.

Last year P&G spent $2.5 billion of its $3 billion US spend on television, but only a paltry $12.2 million (basically petty cash!) on interactive media for all its brands.

That interactivity spend now looks set to grow substantially. The Prilosec sweepstakes was the first time P&G had used third party sites for such a one day event in such a way, and if it is happy with the results then similar campaigns will surely follow. Previously it had restricted such campaigns to its own brand sites and e-mail (its e-mail campaign promoting Tide Coldwater detergent generated a 900% increase to the Tide Coldwater web site in the first week and in its second week the traffic then tripled, according to Hitwise.)

P&G seems to be eyeing the successes arch rival Unilever has had with interactivity – indeed Unilever had already used Yahoo to promote its Dove Soap product placement in a reality TV show.

A good example of P&G’s current ongoing interactive Internet activities is for its Old Spice products. How do you get the target 18-26year-old male to watch a deodorant promotion – have a pretty girl in tight black leather pants and a short top dancing very suggestively, perspiring a lot, and a tag line that reads, “When It’s Hot You Stink.” – that’s how! At that point, and only then, the site shows the deodorant. It’s good enough to have so far attracted more than 600,000 unique viewers and gets about 3,000 visits a day, leading P&G to launch three more Old Spice sites.

The whole idea of viral advertising is to get consumers to spread the word themselves.  The marketing trick is to create an online message that somehow “tickles the fancy” of those watching so they will want to passthe link on to friends, colleagues and family.

Just how much traffic can really effective viral advertising attract? A year ago Burger King on one day had 12.4 million hits to its viral online subservient chicken site with each viewer staying an average of 8 minutes 52 seconds. Translate that kind of viewing time to what it would have cost on television and there is no doubt how cost effective a viral campaign can be.

Getting the message right is not easy, and often those thought to be funny have ended up offending (although there is a suspicion that sometimes offense is intentional to attract, even though culpability is denied). In the UK the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals failed to see the humor in a viral ad for an Opel automobile that saw a dog being thrown out of the car with the tagline for the car being “man’s new best friend”. A viral ad for Ford’s SportKa that showed a cat being decapitated by a sunroof caused such a hue and cry that Ford disowned it, but as atonement it loaned a van to the Cat’s Protection League for six months!

Above all, the proven secret to a successful viral campaign is that the site should be of good quality and it should be provocative. Which reminds us that should you find followthemedia.com a good read we hope you will forward our link to your friends and colleagues, too.

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