Putting buzz into the viral
brand-e talks to Claudio Branno, head of seeding at UK digital marketing outfit The Viral Factory, about what it takes to develop a successful viral campaign.
Where do you start?
You need to understand the audience you are going to talk to. You need to know, strategically and creatively, what the tastes of the audience are, what they look for online, which kind of videos they watch, what their interests are. Through this research you need to learn to talk to them in the same way they talk to each other – [in other words] become one of them. This is what we try to do at The Viral Factory. We try to make the brand appear as any other online user who has the skills to [create] relevant and high quality content.
What are the key ingredients, would you say, which enable a viral to generate buzz?
Well, there is not a perfect mix, to be honest. The key ingredients change from case to case. Ed Robinson [creative guru and co-founder of TVF] once said that a viral campaign is like a train. In that train the wagons represent the branding and the locomotive represent the entertainment bit of the campaign. If the train has got few wagons, it is light, and it doesn’t need so much power to go fast. If the train is instead made up of many wagons, you need a far more powerful engine in order to achieve success. I think this is the key. Find the right balance between branding and entertainment, because it’s the entertainment that will lead the branding be a success.
Once a viral campaign is underway, how do you monitor its progress?
It’s quite simple, and there are plenty of tools in order to do it. There is no marketing technique in the world, as far as I know, so measurable as a viral campaign is. Let’s assume a TV campaign and how its success is going to be measured. Some marketers take over some stats from TV providers and know, pretty much exactly, the numerical audience in the moment their advertisement was [shown] on TV… but then? How can they be sure that their consumers were watching their advertisement? Wasn’t it possible that in that moment they were cooking, or talking on the phone or reading a book, or they were just zapping because they weren’t interested in the advertisement?
With a viral, you can understand what your consumer behaviour was in front of your campaign. A viral piece, call it viral video or game or whatever, [sits] on a unique URL, or on multiple unique URLs, and as long as it does so it is completely measurable.
If you launch an online video, each view reported by a video sharing platform means that your video has been watched at least for 40% [of its duration]. That means that by that piece of content your audience has been exposed to the brand for at least 30 seconds to a minute [of] time and they get exposed to it because they wanted [to be]. They deliberately pushed the play button or played the online game.
Also, you can know exactly, by IP recognition, which country that view or gameplay is coming from, and most of all you can track and monitor how that campaign impacted the qualitative feedback that the audience has about the brand and the campaign itself, just monitoring what bloggers say, what users say on social networks and so on. You can also track any single piece of online coverage the campaign got by [entering] a simple key word search into Google.
Also nowadays, technology allows viral marketers to implement all these monitoring tasks in a few clicks.
How easy is it to measure success?
Usually the most used KPIs are number of views, coverage, reach, qualitative feedback, country breakdown. All this information is very easily recovered and reported to clients, and as I said, far more precise [than in] any other marketing activity.
Claudio Branno will be speaking at our Buzz about the Social Media Buzz event on 14th July at the IAB in central London. More info and sign-up right here.
