Media Buys are an Insurance Policy for Creative Agencies
May 17th, 2010 by Tim WintleEverybody likes to think their viral creatives are going to go viral without any kind of push – but here’s the bottom line:
| No Media Spend | Media Spend | |
|---|---|---|
| Asset Production | -£20K | -£20K |
| Media Spend | -£0.00 | -£7.5K |
| Total Cost | -£20K | -£27.5K |
| Organic Views(Worst case) | 1000 | 1000 |
| Organic Views(Best case) | 500,000 | 500,000 |
| Bought Views | 0 | 50,000 |
| Total Views (Best case) | 500,000 | 550,000 |
| Total Views (Worst case) | 1000 | 51,000 |
| Cost Per View (Best case) | -£0.04 | -£0.05 |
| Cost Per View (Worst case) | -£20 | -£0.539 |
Summary:
How much would you enjoy reporting to your client to tell them their average cost per view was £20? (even if you don’t phrase it like that, they will be calculating it).
Including a bought spend reduces their (and your) risk – in very worst case above you’d be entering that meeting reporting an average cost per view of around 1/40th of that price – that’s 40 times more ROI for them, and a more economically viable campaign.
What’s missing from the above?
Quite a bit – for a start, the more that your content is seen, the more likely it is to get organic views – so a bought media buy makes it far less likely that you’ll be hitting anywhere close to the worst case. For simplicity I’ve left this at the most basic calculation I could.
(Disclaimer: these numbers are estimated and may not necessarily reflect real-life results, which will depend on individual campaigns)
May 17th, 2010 at 12:34 pm
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May 19th, 2010 at 11:12 pm
You make an interesting point here that there is no magic “viral” button. To your point, the more visibility a campaign has, the better chance it has of being picked up by key audiences, so that points to exactly how traditional media and many of the logics of traditional media fit into a landscape driven by cultural distribution. In other words, putting “messages in motion” is often something that combines “old” and “new,” “traditional” and “social” media. Considering most “viral” campaigns are deemed a failure, I think it’s a sign that framing anything as “viral” is a mistake to begin with. Viral, at best, explains a result, not something that can be sought out. My push for awhile, working with Henry Jenkins, Joshua Green, and many in the Convergence Culture Consortium, is to drive people to think not about making something “go viral” but about producing material that people will find relevant and want to spread. Recommendations, spreadability…they are all key, but–to your point–traditional media might be a part of that work. And, on the other end, listening to the audience is crucial. You lay out here the importance of getting the big numbers, but often spreadable content might be about lower-cost content meant to gain traction amongst a niche audience, not necessarily to get passed along amongst a mass group but to gain deeper resonance amongst a few.
May 20th, 2010 at 12:32 am
I think “Viral” is a term that had had somewhat of a harsh backlash in digital media circles. I think it’s evolved and needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Initially it was used [online] to describe something generating exponential (or close to) sharing patterns. People passed it on to all their friends who passed it to theirs and so on…
Advertisers jumped on this chance of free distribution and clients wanted a ‘Viral’ made for their campaign. As the internet became saturated with content (not just ads, but youtube’s UGC too) it became increasingly difficult to generate the same exponential sharing. However, additional social media spaces and the increasing intelligence of the ‘Virals’ meant that people would still pass ads around.
In my opinion, the meaning of viral has now evolved to ‘something that has been built with the intention of being shared online.’
Spreadable media is another term for this… Anything from which the sharer gains social capital from the act of sharing. The success of these campaigns is determined by their penetration into the target market and the traction that they get from additional non-paid-for actions.
Quality content will drive success, but there needs to be some kick-start for the content to reach the right places.
May 20th, 2010 at 2:16 am
Great points, Ally. “Spreadable media” actually came out of a white paper our team put together a couple of years ago now and is the book project we’re working on now. I think you are right that the meaning of “viral” evolved–or mutated, to use the more sinister sound of “viral”–in ways that stretch beyond the original metaphor, which explained the spread of, say, Hotmail quite well. A colleague makes an argument worth considering that applications like Farmville are still truly viral, in the way they generate messages from users that they often aren’t particularly aware they are sending out. I think you’re right that the viral metaphor has been extended to talk about a variety of things outside these directly “viral” examples, but the problem I’ve seen on the client side is that, when people think “viral,” they think they can create something that will magically infect their audience, and it unfortunately doesn’t work so simply. And I find that people are doing good work that really involves listening to their audience, but some of that nuanced gets stripped away when we use language like we are infecting people…In any case, our goal with writing this “spreadable media” book isn’t necessarily to swap out one buzz word for another but to get people thinking about the viral metaphor and how/why they are using it, since it’s become such common parlance of the marketing/advertising/PR/media world.
May 20th, 2010 at 9:30 am
You make a very interesting point in the suggestion that Hotmail and Farmville both show extra features of the viral metaphor by spreading without an explicit desire of the user to share it – piggybacking on everyday use to deliver their own advertising.
“sharable media”, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily have an everyday use itself – but tries to add some social-utility to a user who passes it on. The everyday use it’s entering into is the social game we are all playing every day.
I often think the core problems surrounding the word “viral” started because it was never clearly defined – many think of exponential growth, but clearly even the most simple estimate of a “perfect” asset going viral would be closer to a sigmoid curve than unbounded growth.
Personally I normally look at viral spread as an iterative game, and the measure of how viral a campaign is as related to the second derivative of contacted population size between rounds – the transfer mechanism between nodes is essentially irrelevant to the definition of this metric.
But that measure is a function over game time, itself distributed as a continuous r.v. – not a concept that’s easy to explain in the middle of a pitch (or to anyone who can’t remember their mathematics well).
It’s also not something that’s easy to measure in the real world, not just because most of the data about the edges is centrally stored, but since game-time and world-time are related through a relativistic-style morphism as communications channels get delayed.
The irony of course being that the word “viral” has itself “gone viral”, and so has had to change it’s popular semantic value to fit to the lowest common denominator.
But is there any difference between “viral” and other well-defined words? A segment of people (myself included) cringe when someone asks how to insert a graph into a spreadsheet, but at the end of the day we’ve got to accept that it’s common usage.
May 21st, 2010 at 2:01 pm
I undoubtedly agree that “viral” has “gone viral,” if anything can. And, to your point, sometimes it’s easiest to agree to the common phrases those around us are using to make sure we are talking about the same commonly defined thing. However, with some terms we use, I feel that multiple people are using them without meaning the exact same thing or with a skewed understanding of what we mean in the process. Words mean nothing beyond their commonly agreed-upon definition after all, and yet when people talk “going viral,” I find that some have in mind define by widespread success (results), others something people will want to pass along (form of distribution), and yet others aesthetics (clever, funny, low-budget, short, etc.) Thus, as I’m sure you all have experienced, “make me a viral…” has disputed meanings, and the work has to be done to make sure everyone’s using the word in the same way…
I saw a stat back in 2008 that 85% or so of “viral campaigns” were deemed a failure, but I wonder how many were failures because the people who used “viral” had metrics of success that made no sense for the brand or the audience in question. And thus I find that the problem with “viral” is that, even in its common usage, there are connotations that often lead to people thinking about their communication goals and treating the audience implicitly as a carrier for their message rather than an autonomous human being. The emphasis with the phrasing of viral ends up pushing people often to think more about what’s baked into their content than they do about listening to the audience, etc. Of course, some significantly good work is done under the banner of “viral,” but I do find the use of the terms in the industry as a whole is one factor in shaping how that work is done, how success is defined, etc.
But, as I said, my goal is less to swap out one word with another but to make sure the majority of marketers who find themselves using “viral” in internal discussions or agencies who lead these discussions with their clients are thinking through the language they use, setting common expectations with clients, etc., and not letting language guide them implicitly to places they don’t mean for an initiative to go.
In any case, as we get the book together and as we write on these ideas various places, I’d really appreciate your all’s feedback on the subject. Feel free to email at samford[edited]mit.edu. I’m happy to share some stuff we’ve written in other venues, etc.