The Marketing Student

5 marketing tactics that made Movember an unexpected global success

David Fallarme — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 13:30:10 +0000

Movember started from an idea between a few guys in a pub and has grown into an international fundraising sensation. What makes it so popular?

Movember is a fundraiser that takes place every November, where men pledge to grow out moustaches to raise money for men’s health causes. All starting from a chat between a few friends in a pub, it has since become a global fundraising machine. It began with humble goals — getting 30 people to grow out their ‘staches for a month — so we know that its creators did not have an idea of the worldwide potential their idea had.

Like many viral phenomenons, it grew organically, tapping into something that resonated with a lot of people. Here’s a look at why their idea unintentionally became a worldwide phenomenon, which can hopefully spark some ideas on how you can replicate it for your own projects.

It fills a niche
Men don’t have a cause they can rally around — there is no “breast cancer awareness month” for guys. By positioning itself as a “manly cause”, Movember gives men something unique and meaningful to celebrate, making moustaches the equivalent of pink ribbons.
It’s universally funny
There’s something funny and entertaining about moustaches (nobody knows why, but it probably has something to do with Tom Selleck). A lot of Movember campaigns capitalize on this and center on the idea that almost everyone finds moustaches inherently amusing. It’s like videos of cute babies on YouTube — they’re fun to share because it taps into something everyone can enjoy.
It’s effortlessly viral
Other fundraisers typically recruit its participants to do something high-profile (and high effort): running a marathon or shaving your hair. The nature of Movember, on the other hand, makes it effortless to share with your friends. It turns anyone who participates into a walking, talking billboard. Instead of getting you to send a mass email to friends asking for donations, it achieves virality by piggybacking on an activity that you already do: uploading pictures of yourself on Facebook.
It’s super social
By setting up a high-visibility website with well-executed social features and encouraging partners to make Movember-themed Facebook apps, Movember enables participants to spread the word on their own. They’ve set up marketing channels to focus on creating connections between its participants.
Its target demographic is perfect
Moustache-growing males are a perfect target demographic for potential partners. It’s a no-brainer that Foster’s and Schick are sponsors of Movember. These companies have major marketing budgets that further legitimize Movember and push its awareness beyond what they could normally get as a non-profit.

The marketing team at Movember has a great product on their hands: it’s a cause that has a lot of cool things baked into it. Their marketing materials are still missing a level of polish, but the cause is so viral that it doesn’t really matter. It’s something they will figure out as their brand matures.

Compared to other fundraisers, it’s smart that they’ve chosen to focus on the fun, positive aspects of fundraising, as opposed to the typical approach of tugging at your heartstrings. The logical next step is for them is to run with this angle and create mascots and spokespersons for the brand, localized across countries. There’s a trend in “manly” mascots these days — Old Spice and Dos Equis come to mind — so it’s easy to see a Movember mascot being a hit.

Think about how you can make these factors work for your campaigns and squeeze more efficiency out of your budget.

A teardown of Zynga marketing: how Zynga sucks you in and keeps you there

David Fallarme — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 01:58:32 +0000

Whenever Zynga launches a new title, it’s sure to be a top-10 Facebook hit. But how do they get people into the game?

Sometime at the end of November, Zynga will finally release their IPO. It is one of the most anticipated IPOs of 2011, as Zynga is the undisputed top dog in the new industry of social gaming.

Their dominance comes from their massive userbase; 4 of the top 5 social gaming companies would need to merge simply to compete with Zynga’s enormous footprint on the industry (see AppData leaderboards).

Certainly, Zynga achieved this position on the strength of building best-in-class products. Much debate exists whether Zynga can truly be called a gaming company or whether they are merely a media company that uses cute graphics and psychological exploitation to generate revenue. But what is undeniable is that they are dominant, which they do through leadership in product design and marketing.

How Facebook helps Zynga stay #1

As one of the first game companies on Facebook, launching in 2007, they were able to take advantage of the social network’s then-lax privacy settings.

We all remember how annoying it was to incessantly have FarmVille posts in your news feed. They spammed the hell out of everyone. But as annoying as they were, there was an even more annoying truth — they worked. Extremely well.

This was the golden age of Facebook social gaming — advertising was free, users were cheap and achieving virality on a massive scale was easy. Zynga jumped on this, cloning and spamming their way to the top.

Aware of the viral potential within Facebook, Zynga has since prioritized a close relationship with the social network. Rumours abound that they get preferential treatment because of their symbiotic relationship, allowing them to get an inside track on new features and policies to ensure they are the first to exploit new channels. This ensures them a huge user acquisition advantage over their competition.

Acquisition: getting you in the game

Zynga’s secret sauce is their ruthless product design mathematics combined with an intimate knowledge of Facebook policy. Let’s now go to the tactical level, breaking down their marketing and user acquisition strategy, looking at how they get and keep users in their ecosystem.

1. Cross-promote to your captive audience

This cross-promotion takes the form of in-game ads, banners above the gameplay area, and complete saturation of all communication channels and social media accounts.

Their enormous userbase — around 160M monthly users — allows them the benefit of launching a top-10 Facebook game every time, regardless of game quality.

How Zynga cross-promotes within its huge userbase (click to expand)

2. Peak early with Facebook ads

In the wild west days of Facebook, everyone was able to push content to tons of users for free. But Facebook has since wrested back control of its viral channels and instituted an ad network in its place, one that Zynga begrudgingly participates in.

Zynga has shown a preference to push its games to peak early. With the company launching several games a year, this is necessary so that it does not spread itself too thinly.

Peaking early is also important to take advantage of network effects. Their games are nearly unplayable for those who choose to play alone. Zynga game design is notorious for levying you with a “friend tax” early on; that is, at some point, you will have to invite friends to play so that you can progress in the game. For this reason, Zynga has huge budgets for on-Facebook advertising, estimated at $5-10M a month.

Comparing peaking strategies of social game companies (Click to expand)

By throwing swaths of money into user acquisition at an early stage, Zynga maximizes the amount of people that start to play around the same time, making sure that you always have someone to play with, which keeps you happily progressing, which keeps your interest (and time investment) in the game high.

Depending on how well a game monetizes its users, the ad budget for a game can essentially be unlimited. Keep an eye out for it: you’ll see that Zynga continues to run ads for CityVille despite the game being one year old.

3. Buzz-worthy PR

Zynga has also proven to be good at getting press. This ensures that they’ve got a chance to reach users who aren’t normally within their reach.

They’ve partnered with high-profile acts and brands such as Enrique Iglesias, Lady Gaga and Capital One. By making these kinds of connections, they’re able to get a wider scope of people talking about them off-Facebook.

I should note that in the artists’ case, it’s likely that Zynga is the one paying for the partnership — they are the one piggybacking on the artists’ reputations for press.

4. Goodwill PR

Ever since the Haiti earthquake, Zynga has been quick in responding to disaster relief and emergency events. Their work with the Japan tsunami, Gulf coast oil spill and Haiti relief ensured that they always had good press about circulating in the media.

CastleVille, their latest game, generated some press when they announced that they would donate to charities when users “liked” the CastleVille fanpage.

Retention: keeping you playing

1. Facebook notifications

This is arguably the most effective way to keep you playing — by using your own friends to keep you invested in the game. At least once a day, you can expect a friend to send or ask you for a gift, or ask you to join their game.

Facebook game notifications (click to expand)

Multiply that behavior across multiple friends with whom you play several Zynga games, and you start to understand why it’s important for them to get a huge rush of users upfront. Your friends do a much better job of keeping you in the game than Zynga advertising.

This was the channel that Zynga originally used to rise to the top; they used your gameplay in Farmville to shamelessly send notifications to everyone in your friends list. Facebook has since clamped down on the spamminess of notifications, but it remains a powerful way for gaming companies to keep their users coming back.

2. CRM and incentives to play

As one of their players, you can expect to receive incessant reminders about the games you play. You’ll get free gifts and new feature updates showing up in your news feed. If you’ve stopped playing for a while, Zynga will send you a “we’ve missed you” email with a basket of free goodies to get you playing again. They do everything in their power to make sure their game is top-of-mind.

Free gift links (click to expand)

Feature updates (click to expand)

Emails to lapsed users (click to expand)

3. Strong community hooks

Every gaming company attracts its fair share of hardcore players and spenders (“whales” in social gaming parlance). Zynga ensures that these hardcore players — the ones who write game walkthroughs, exchange tips and discuss the game with other players — have a home to congregate and goad each other on. Zynga’s message boards are active and well-staffed with moderators who keep a pulse on the player community.

In the first half of 2011, Zynga also launched RewardVille, a loyalty rewards program that lets players collect gifts if they play enough times in a day.

Zynga forums activity (click to expand)

Zynga Rewardville (click to expand)

4. Extended “moments of delight”

If you’ve ever played a Zynga game, you’ll notice that it’s held to a high standard of production value. It’s full of little “moments of delight”. This level of polish is maintained all throughout their marketing materials — so that every time you come into contact with anything Zynga, this feeling comes to mind and you re-surface those positive “delight” emotions that the product team made sure were in the game.

The admirable part is that they maintain this production value on nearly everything, even channels whose ROI is low or difficult to ascertain. Zynga’s twitter page has 50,000 followers, which is astonishingly low given the hundreds of millions of people that have played Zynga games. Videos on their YouTube page also get dismally low view counts, and yet they devote enough resources to ensure they are high quality.

Zynga marketing lessons

Frictionless beats flashiness
Notice how I ranked Zynga’s user acquisition methods — the high-profile, newsworthy stuff is last. Ironically, the stuff that requires the most effort gives the least payout.

Think of the key steps in your own user acquisition funnel and where you can tweak efficiency while keeping investment low. In most cases, it’s a behind-the-scenes, totally unsexy tactic. I once worked for a charity who got the great majority of their donations via automatic payroll deductions (e.g. $5 from every paycheque), instead of the big flashy events that would end up in tomorrow’s paper.

In Zynga’s case, it may be worthwhile for them to run all the media-friendly stuff because they are a pre-IPO company with capital to burn. Most organizations are not so fortunate.

Test and refine: not just for engineers
Zynga’s products are data-driven, and so their marketing employs the same approach. By having a culture of metrics and testing, they are constantly tweaking and learning instead of relying on “what’s worked before”.

This allows them to be on the bleeding edge of marketing tactics, using and exploiting them before anyone else does.

High-quality across the board
You’ve worked hard to create positive feelings for users of your product — take the effort to maintain it in every interaction they get with your brand.

Think about staying at an expensive 5-star hotel, then getting a “thank you” email from them after your stay that was in plain text and with riddled typos. Even for a company with 160M users, the little touches matter.

4 Psychology blogs that will help you kick ass at Marketing

David Fallarme — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 15:32:17 +0000

Reading psychology blogs for practical everyday learnings is always difficult.

Most are too academic to be accessible; even fewer have stuff you can actually translate into action.

The psychology blogs below do a fantastic job of distilling data into an entertaining, easily-digestible form. If they don’t improve your marketing plans, they will at the very least make you stop and think about how your mind works.

Psyblog

Jeremy Dean tops nearly every “must read psychology blogs” list out there, and with good purpose. He expertly connects academic findings to familiar, everyday behaviours and gently points out flaws in our thinking and explains how we decide and why we act the way we do.

Marketers will appreciate how Jeremy challenges firmly-held beliefs over certain things. For instance, his article on why sex or violence does not sell.

You Are Not So Smart

The long-form posts at YANSS make for excellent reading over your morning coffee; you can tell David McRaney is having fun at telling us why we are dumber than we would like to think.

David’s insights on how consumers paint themselves into a corner first turned me onto the site, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

Social Triggers

Derek Halpern uses plain, straightforward language to tell you exactly how to use data and psychology to improve your marketing efforts.

Marketers who also wear web designer hats will love Derek’s site as there’s lots of great material on conversion and reducing churn.

Which Test Won

Anne Holland’s A/B testing website showcases a type of psychology that is less academic and more applied.

Sometimes, it’s refreshing to simply see post-mortems of tests instead of verbose, deep-dive pre-ponderings on what will work best.

By looking at real-world examples, with real-world data, tested with real-world consumers, you get a ton of case studies to comb through that will help you uncover the psychology of web users.

Know of any blogs that should be on this list? Please share in the comments.

Your Opinion is Worthless: Why Numbers Matter

David Fallarme — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 15:58:51 +0000

You and I always make the mistake of thinking that our opinion is representative of everyone else’s. I think this sucks, and therefore, nobody in their right mind could possibly enjoy this. Thanks to the internet, everyone is suddenly a righteously indignant critic.

The problem is that the internet is an echo chamber. With good reason; we only visit sites that we want to visit. If I love Sarah Palin, am I have going to have Huffington Post in my RSS feed? No, because I wouldn’t even know what the Huffington Post is to begin with.

This thinking reduces an infinite internet into something very, very finite: your own narrow point of view, made even narrower by biases and experience. This is incredibly dangerous for anyone, especially if you’re a marketer. The world shrinks to your own prejudices, preventing you from seeing trends, shifting demographics and understanding the big picture. The only way to combat this restrictive mindset is to constantly shock it with something objective and powerful: the jarring reality of numbers.

Let’s examine a few things that are commonly believed to “suck” or to be things that “no one cares about” — as well as the astonishing numbers behind them.

1. Farmville

“That farming game” on Facebook…only people with no lives play that, right? Who the hell would want to click on animated farm to collect virtual crops?

To answer this question, we need to take a moment to imagine every single person in the 8-million-strong city of New York. They’re riding packed subway cars, they’re watching the Yankees play and they’re jogging around Central Park. Now imagine that all of those people will play Farmville at least once in the next 24 hours.

Now, imagine every single person in the city of London doing the exact same thing.

This is roughly how many people play Farmville every day. Who wants to collect their virtual crops? 15 million people do. Every single day.

For a quick reality check: go to Farmville on Facebook and check out how many of your friends already play.

2. The Twilight movies

The successful Twilight film series is perhaps best known for capturing two lucrative demographics: tweens and undersexed American housewives. It is also known for being critically panned. Despite critics’ vitriol, the series has amassed 1.8 billion dollars at the box office.

If we compare that to Oscar-winning movies — movies that “don’t suck” by anyone’s measure — you would have to sum the box offices receipts of the last 7 Oscar winners to surpass Twilight’s total.

3. Non-English-speaking entertainment

Backstreet Boys" width="150" height="116" class="alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-544" />If we evicted everybody in the city of Seattle to house the fans of Asian mega-group TVXQ, we would have a dramatic housing shortage.

You think the Backstreet Boys or New Kids on the Block were popular? TVXQ holds the Guinness world record for world’s biggest fan club with 800,000+ members. TVXQ also holds the Guinness world record for “most photographed celebrity of all time”, having been photographed half a billion times.

There are gigantic entertainment ecosystems elsewhere in the world that we don’t explore because of our Western ethnocentrism. The people that realize this first can study their successes and get a headstart over everyone who had their blinders on.

4. Kidz Bop

Have you seen those ads where kids sing karaoke to a popular song? That’s an ad for Kidz Bop, one of the best-kept secrets in the music industry.

The formula is simple: obtain distribution rights to pop songs, hire some singing children then sell the CD for an insane markup. The producers of Kidz Bop have been riding this formula to the tune of 8 Gold certifications in 11 years, along with a handful of top 5 showings in the Billboard 200.

I abhor this business model, as it completely strips away every semblance of artistry in a song and reduces it to its commercial core. I am certain that I am not alone. I am also certain that whenever the producers hear criticism, they simply recall of 50 Cent’s timeless phrase:

If they go’n hate, then let them hate, and watch the money pile up.
- Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson

Why numbers matter

Everyone lives in their own echo chamber. For marketers, this means we get lots of practice reading about marketing, writing about marketing, thinking about marketing, and discussing marketing…with other marketers. At the end of the day, who are you selling to? Is it possible to communicate effectively to an audience that you never even knew existed?
Preventing blindness to opportunities. Just because you personally dislike or do not understand something does not mean it will be a failure. Imagine if you invested in Farmville when “only” 2 million people played it every day.
The forest, not the trees. As a marketer in these times, keeping cognizant of the big picture is the name of the game. For example; you may personally love using Twitter; but if your target market isn’t…is it really worth your time?

Pic thanks to TheBigTouffe

Chapter close…

David Fallarme — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 15:39:25 +0000

I’ve decided to change the focus of this blog away from Generation Y topics. As much fun as it is to write about Gen Y, it’s simply time to move on to something else.

The new direction will be an amalgamation of topics that I have always found interesting. I feel that connecting the dots between these topics forms a larger and very exciting picture, given the context of where marketing and technology are today.

A big thank you to everyone who has supported the site!

If you haven’t done so yet — subscribe to the site now — as bigger and better things are yet to come.

A Day In The Life of Gen Y: China

David Fallarme — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:24:22 +0000

I’ve been in Shanghai for a little while, and I’m always fascinated by seeing which foreign brands have successfully integrated into China. Last year, I took note of the brands I saw over the course of a day. I wanted to recreate a Chinese version of that, so I asked some of my native Chinese Gen Y friends about their own “brand timelines”.

Gathering recognizable brands turned out to be a little more difficult than I thought. The Chinese Generation Y-ers I talked to interact with brands in a different way than North Americans. For example, clothing is usually brandless (or effectively no-name) and you go shopping at markets. For food, you usually eat at your schools’ canteen, a local noodle shop, or cook something for yourself. A big part of their day is interacting with items that can be considered brandless.

With that in mind, what follows is a composite of the different aspects of a Gen Y’s life in China, gathered from a handful of people aged 19-25.

Personal Healthcare

Personal healthcare is dominated by foreign brands.

Clothes*

The reality is that most people get their clothes at no-name shops. If you’ve got foreign-branded stuff, you’ve either got a little bit of cash or it’s a fake.

Breakfast

Usually, people make their own breakfast.

Commuting

Metro is really the only way to go. No one’s got a car unless you’re really rich. Besides, license plates are only available through auction.

Hanging out

KFC, Pizza Hut and Mcdonald’s are very popular in Shanghai. In contrast to North America, Pizza Hut successfully sells itself as an upscale, classy venue and people go to Mcdonald’s to hang out, study and chat.

Going online

Sony Vaios have roughly the same “prestige” that Macs have in the West. Apple is starting to make headway, but Shanghai is very much a Microsoft Windows stronghold (thanks to massive, massive piracy). Apple retains its pricing strategy (read: too expensive), and the benefits don’t connect with consumers. Basically, people don’t have enough money to be pretentious…zing.

Taobao is an online shopping platform that can be compared to eBay and Amazon. It’s so big that it’s currently beating Amazon in 2009 receipts.

Baidu is the major player in search, with over 70% market share. Google hovers 20% share.

Entertainment

The Lakers and the Rockets hold a significant mindshare here, due to fascination with Kobe and Yao Ming. PPS is a P2P app where you can watch tv shows and movies (works similar to KaZaa) and YouKu is the equivalent of the banned YouTube.

Connecting

Facebook never really took off here (and is currently banned). In its place we have two local giants in the SNS scene, RenRen and Kaixin (top right). The way it was explained to me was that RenRen is for “everyone” while Kaixin is for “white collars”. They were built as Facebook clones and are currently engaged in a membership count race.

QQ (middle, penguin) and MSN dominate the instant messaging scene, while everyone constantly texts with China Mobile, operator of the world’s largest mobile network.

The Land of The Clones

Brands are slowly and surely creeping into China. Local Shanghainese often tell me about how different everything was even just 5 years ago. Westernization is kept on a tight leash and there are cheap local alternatives to almost everything. Tech and Web companies are going to have an especially tough time, because of the nearly nonexistent IP laws in China and the home-court language advantage.

Globally, some things are the same, such as the constant need for connectedness. MSN spaces actually has a bit of a following here and it seems like everyone from the ages of 15-45 has a QQ instant messaging account. Pictures and statuses get thrown on the web on Kaixin and RenRen, just as we love doing on Facebook.

Gen Y Can Ruin Your Brand in 24 Hours

David Fallarme — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:35:25 +0000

You can’t be caught flat-footed in the web these days, even if your brand only has a finger dipped in the sea of social media. Here are 3 examples of how Gen Y can blindside you and your brand, all inspired by the recent hoopla around Kurt Greenbaum, the latest target of the Internet Hate Machine™.

Kurt Greenbaum

Social Media Director (actual job title) Greenbaum took issue with someone leaving a vulgarity in his comments, so Greenbaum put on his best hall-monitor sash and sought out commenter’s employer. Commenter lost his job and Greenbaum gloats in his blog. Blog comments then fill with shock and anger over his breach of privacy policy (and smugness).

Anger snowballs until it hits social news sites, where at this point various people start to slander his name on twitter, novelty blogs and the like. In the course of about a day, his personal contact info (like his home address and his personal mobile) has been published on the web ad nauseum and his blog comments and Flickr account have been overrun with negative feedback. His Google results will forever have a permanent stain.

Fortunately for Greenbaum this is a fairly nerdy violation that this is restricted to social-media-savvy networks on the web (my mother has no clue what a privacy policy even is). But since his job is a “Social Media Director”, I hope he has learned a thing or two about damage control.

The Lesson
Be accountable for everything published on your website. Greenbaum wasn’t familiar with his own privacy policy and has incurred a lot of wrath.

HabitatUK and the Hashtag Spam

The marketing team at Habitat, a UK furniture firm, had a chat one morning…

Nigel: We need to be on Tweeter.
Geoff: You mean Twitter?
Nigel: Right! Whatever!
Geoff: I think my nephew uses that…
Nigel: Great! Throw some money at him and get him in here!

That is probably miles (or 1.6 kilometers) away from what actually happened, but it might as well be true. The company soon started spamming Twitter hashtags for completely unrelated topics. In short, they used the popularity of topics like the Iran election protests and iPhones to advertise a sale. Their tweets showed up at the top of the heap for these hot topics, at which point everyone called them out for spam on an ugly scale.

The Lesson
You target in the real world, you should target (even more) when using social media and relating to Gen Y.

United Airlines

United breaks some guy”s guitar in transit. Guy makes a music video about poor customer service and zero restitution. Gen Y digs the message and spreads it throughout social networks (see: How Things Get Popular On the Internet) and ends up reinforcing the stereotype that United Airlines has awful customer service.

The Lesson
Don’t break anyone’s friggin guitar. United really could not have done anything here outside of improving their customer service, which they said they would do in predictable, standard corporate-speak. The real lesson here is that with the web, you don’t know who the influencers are, so you better step up your customer service game and make sure everyone is happy.

photo by Cathérine

Only Stupid People Click Internet Ads

David Fallarme — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:01:10 +0000

I was watching a video on YouTube the other day, you know, one of those videos where a text ad in the lower-fifth of the screen pops up. With sharpshooter accuracy, I hovered the mouse over the small, boxed “X” and clicked. It all happened in less than an instant and I went back to watching my video.

Afterward, I reflected on all the ads that were thrown in my face that never even got a chance, thanks to my shark-like instincts to kill anything that looks like an ad. The year 2002 was an especially good year to hone this skill, as it was around that time that those annoying spy-cam ads spawned instantaneously all over the web.

Who actually clicks these ads?

I tried to visualize who was clicking those slap-the-monkey, punch-the-boxer ads. And who was clicking those unbearable inline text ads (the kind that creates links from random words in a blog post).

A rough answer to that question is as follows:

people ages 25-44
sub $40’000 income
frequent auctions, gambling, career services sites

I found it strange that these were people who spent 4x more time online than regular users, and yet they were clicking more. Wouldn’t they develop banner blindness? That just goes to show that exposure doesn’t equal savvy.

Are they stupid?

Is it really fair to say that they are stupid? From the comScore piece, this “clicking” demographic strikes me as the same type that compulsively buys lotto and sweepstakes tickets. These folks don’t know how to handle their money, are lower-middle-class, and spend way too much time on the internet.

Their wanton clicking (with no commensurate increase in purchases) would certainly lead some advertisers to call them stupid, as in, those darn people who cost me money but never buy anything. The real losers here are the advertisers: clicks buy traffic, not intentions.

Gen Y, The Anti-Clickers

Word-of-mouth and Google are basically all you need to know when Gen Y is looking to buy a product. When I was in the market for a DSLR, I asked around, got some opinions and went to look up reviews on the cameras I shortlisted. After some searching, I went out to a brick-and-mortar store and bought it. Ads never played a part in the entire process.

It can be said that previous advertising had thrown Canon and Nikon as the two main contenders for my money, but I could have easily been swayed by good reviews for a Sony on a third-party, neutral website. (I ended up buying a Canon).

It’s incredibly hard to reach Generation Y through online ads, even when you hit them where they hang out.

I’m definitely on-board with those that say that the pay-per-click model is dead, or needs to die.

Further reading:
The end of the free lunch—again (The Economist)
Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet (TechCrunch)

Photo by Davichi

Gen Y Needs Nerds To Tell Them What’s Cool

David Fallarme — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:56:47 +0000

I’ve always been amazed at how things get popular on the internet so quickly. I remember watching Evolution of Dance skyrocket into pop culture in 2006. This year, the internet transformed the letters FML from meaningless acronym to hilarious punchline.

How do things get popular on the internet?

I’ve created the graph below to help explain the phenomenon.

The answer, put simply, is nerds.

The word nerd gets a bad rap. Basically, anyone who frequents a social news site is a nerd. Nerd just means that you are tech-savvy and internet-literate. I’m proud to be a nerd. Nerds have first-dibs on information, and information is power.

In the graph, coolness is a reference to when you are laughing at the joke. Have you heard the joke before, did you get the joke right as the punchline was delivered, or did you laugh once the comedian left the stage?.

The graph shows that nerds are the ones telling the jokes.

David After Dentist: A Case Study

Let’s take a quick look at a real-life example of this model: David After Dentist.
You can watch the video here.

DISCOVERY
David’s father uploads the video on YouTube on January 30, 2009.

SOCIAL NEWS
Video is picked up on Digg on February 4. It gets 10,000+ diggs.

FACEBOOK
Social news site users then pass it on to the general population through instant messages, Facebook walls, emails. It gets talked about at coffee breaks everywhere, Did you see that video of the kid after the dentist?

MAINSTREAM NEWS
Wall Street Journal writes about the video on February 9. Time Magazine does an article on the video on February 11.

SOCCER MOMS
On March 26, The Today Show interviews the family who made the video.

Why Nerds are so important

For every David After Dentist, there are a million non-starters that never even come close to pop culture stardom; they get filtered out during the Social News stage. Nerds whittle away all the meh content and highlight the gems. When it comes to the internet and user-generated content, nerds are the gatekeepers.

In previous generations, the ones doing the content filtering were mostly corporations and Big Media. With Gen Y and its connectedness, that influence has trickled down and spread out. Social news and networking sites have democratized the process, making Generation Y the first generation where broadcasters can actually be the last to hear about newsworthy items.

How Kit-Kat Made Me Realize Marketing Is Evil

David Fallarme — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:01:24 +0000

The other day, I wandered into a 7/11 wanting chocolate. I didn’t know which candybar I wanted, I hadn’t decided. And so I stood there, in a colourful aisle surrounded by candy and snacks, looking at boxes and boxes of chocolate bars, mulling over my decision. I surveyed all the screaming colours and smiling cartoons, eventually deciding that I wanted a Kit-Kat.

As I was reaching for the candybar, I was blindsided with a flash of introspection. Out of all the options, why was I picking Kit-Kat?

It was as if all the candybars in that 7/11 were a million tiny marketing execs, dressed in suits in their candybar colours, all yelling at the top of their lungs, clamouring for attention like stockbrokers right before the closing bell. As my hand drew closer, the tiny red marketing men of Kit-Kat cheered and claimed victory, the losers threw a tantrum, moaned, and went back into a huddle to figure out how to yell louder at the next guy who comes down the aisle.

Consumers are horribly undermatched

So much time, energy and money is spent in our society to funnel consumer behaviour into a desired course of action. People devote entire careers to figuring out how to make people buy their candybars. Marketers are in meetings, watching people in fake shopping labs, staying late at work away from their families, so that they can learn how to make strangers think that Axe Bodyspray will increase their virility or that McDonald’s is an essential part of every childhood.

I became horribly sick at the thought that I was starting a career where my sole purpose would be to make people believe that they can’t live without Brand X.

It was in this moment that I realized marketing is evil. Whenever you step into a grocery store aisle, your wits are against the wits of millions of Marketers, armed with consumer tracking studies and pilot tests and multi-city research and loads and loads of statistics.

Soulless Commerce

Manipulation and fakery of the finest details takes place on a daily basis so that Jane and Joe Consumer will pick Brand X.

I thought about all the 30-second ads on TV, and all of the focus groups, rewrites and reshoots that go into them in an effort to exert maximum consumer influence.

I thought about all the billboards and posters on the street and in magazines and how incredibly manufactured it all was, how the models in the pictures were hand-picked from thousands, then tweaked and photoshopped, optimizing appeal for the target audience.

I thought about the creeping, unstoppable march of marketing into our personal lives, and how any blank crevasse of public domain is being claimed under the flag of Advertising. Those miniature yelling ad execs are not just in our grocery aisles, they’re on our gas pumps, in our tv shows, and even on our parking stripes.

I thought about how powerful brands have become, from Nelly naming his daughter Chanel to basketball teams named Burger King Whoppers.

I thought about how nothing is authentic anymore. Marketing has reduced everything to design-by-focus-group and popular culture is usurped to increase Brand Awareness and ROI. Everything wonderful and real became reduced to soulless statistics.

All I wanted was some damn chocolate and instead I got depressed about my career. I needed to take a step back.

The Necessary Evil

Marketing is a field of mercenary psychologists. We are people who are continually trying to figure out what makes consumers tick, so we can get more money. I thought: Is that really so bad? Isn’t that the essence of business?

Marketing is inevitable. There will always be competition and there will always be a need to prove your worth in relation to competitors.

Farmers in tribal villages, fourth graders battling for class president and entrepreneurs seeking funding all rely on marketing. The American health care debate is a fierce battleground of ideologies, and both sides need marketing. Marketing answers the consumer question: Why should I pay any attention to you?

If I lived in complete isolation from media my entire life and wandered into 7/11 looking for chocolate, I, as a consumer, will still use marketing to guide my decision. I may not have been exposed to ads, posters and billboards for the candybars, but I would evaluate packaging…shape…name…price… to make a choice. All of that is marketing.

The Root of Evil

The ugliness of Marketing is that it cheapens so many things, all for an extra dollar. Remember Chocolate Rain? Marketing execs found something that was popular, so they decided to throw money at Tay Zonday and make Cherry Chocolate Rain:

At 8 million views, I’m sure it achieved Coke’s marketing objectives. But there is something disheartening about taking something organic and authentic and slapping brand names all over it.

Gen Y and the Push-Pull

Marketing works when an intersection exists where the brands push and the consumer pulls. Generation Y is living in a time where for the first time, the consumer can control the corporate push. Tivo and Adblock are testaments to this ability.

This selective screening just causes brands and Marketers to yell even louder, causing an escalating arms race between push and pull. This is a strange battle because ultimately marketers and consumers need each other.

Is Marketing Evil?

Is marketing evil? Absolutely, but only in the same way that the gun or the printing press is evil. It is a tool that takes whatever form its owner wants it to take. Power is afforded to whoever uses it.

As the threshold of marketing and corporatization pushes deeper into our personal lives, the only hope I can have is that in my lifetime, I don’t see parents selling naming rights for their children to GoldenPalace.

photos by s2art, marketingfacts