Power to the People
AdVoice, Singapore, july 2003 issue
With the growing amount of time we spend daily on cleaning up our mailboxes, the Spam debate is raging all over the media. People and organizations from all walks of life are clamouring for some action to end our collective misery. This will probably lead to anti-Spam rules in some form or other in the near future, but in the mean time perhaps it’s useful to look at this from another angle.
In recent years we have seen a proliferation of new media, of which email is only one. Telephones –both mobile and fixed–, the Internet, SMS, MMS, I-mode, the list is getting longer and longer. And all these new media have one thing in common, a thing that completely sets them apart from traditional media like print, radio and TV: they put more power in the hands of the consumer.
Marketers have discovered this too. It has even resulted in a new phenomenon, called Viral Marketing (VM). Viral Marketers enlist consumers in the distribution of their marketing messages. Instead of the usual one-to-many broadcast situation, the result is what we call peer-to-peer messaging. The message spreads in much the same way as a virus does.
VM has become a lot easier with the advent of really simple redistribution methods. Nothing is easier than forwarding an email or an SMS. And as a method for marketing communications, VM has great potential. After all, if you’re able to get people not only to listen to your message but also actively take part in redistributing it, you can be really certain that you caught their attention.
But there are drawbacks too. Peer-to-peer distribution puts a lot of power into the hands of the peers, who are, after all, the actual distributors. Leaving redistribution to others can mean that the message gets modified in the process, sometimes even beyond recognition. If you wonder how bad that can get, just think back of the ‘whisper-game’ that some of us played back at school. One classmate whispers a message to the next one, on to the next, and when you hear the message read back at the other end of the chain, it has nothing to do with the original.
But media like email and SMS have one great advantage: the message is not verbal, but written. Simple forwarding without any modification requires far less effort than rewriting. Especially SMS, with its strictly confined format of text-only and 160 characters is ideally suited for the purpose. Those who doubt that are invited to take a closer look at some of the prize winners at last year’s DMAsia 2002 Awards. Campaigns like ‘God’ and ‘Gorillaz’ reached amazing results using VM tools, raising great awareness and overwhelming response with their respective target groups on relatively low budgets.
SMS is not the only medium that has seen VM applications. A spectacular example using e-cards as a medium is Singapore Airlines’ 1998 Chicago campaign. Traditional promotional methods pulled people towards a website from where they could send e-cards to friends and relatives, extolling the virtues of SIA’s new flight to Chicago. Within eight weeks, 3 million of those card where sent by almost 400,000 people from 200 countries, 70% of which came from viral spreading.
But SMS remains in the lead as the most preferred VM medium. This is attributable to its unrivalled speed and simplicity, not to mention the fact that everybody is always carrying his handphone. MMS adds to this a host of new possibilities, like pictures, videos, and interactive messages. Its use, however, will be impeded until MMS enabled handphones have reached sufficient penetration.
VM is not only relevant to those who are prepared to use it. Even traditional media are subject to power erosion on the part of the broadcasters. In the US, TV can now be received on a device called a Tivo, which enables users to view, stop, rewind and replay the action at any given moment in time, without having to record the programme first. And just over the horizon now is Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB), which will give radio listeners a host of similar features.
Soon, marketers need to be prepared to cede some of their power to their consumers. The marketing community will have to learn how to do that in a controlled way.
That last bit is absolutely necessary, because by now we all know what can go wrong if you delegate the power of message distribution to large numbers of people without putting controls in place. It is called spam.
With the growing amount of time we spend daily on cleaning up our mailboxes, the Spam debate is raging all over the media. People and organizations from all walks of life are clamouring for some action to end our collective misery. This will probably lead to anti-Spam rules in some form or other in the near future, but in the mean time perhaps it’s useful to look at this from another angle.
In recent years we have seen a proliferation of new media, of which email is only one. Telephones –both mobile and fixed–, the Internet, SMS, MMS, I-mode, the list is getting longer and longer. And all these new media have one thing in common, a thing that completely sets them apart from traditional media like print, radio and TV: they put more power in the hands of the consumer.
Marketers have discovered this too. It has even resulted in a new phenomenon, called Viral Marketing (VM). Viral Marketers enlist consumers in the distribution of their marketing messages. Instead of the usual one-to-many broadcast situation, the result is what we call peer-to-peer messaging. The message spreads in much the same way as a virus does.
VM has become a lot easier with the advent of really simple redistribution methods. Nothing is easier than forwarding an email or an SMS. And as a method for marketing communications, VM has great potential. After all, if you’re able to get people not only to listen to your message but also actively take part in redistributing it, you can be really certain that you caught their attention.
But there are drawbacks too. Peer-to-peer distribution puts a lot of power into the hands of the peers, who are, after all, the actual distributors. Leaving redistribution to others can mean that the message gets modified in the process, sometimes even beyond recognition. If you wonder how bad that can get, just think back of the ‘whisper-game’ that some of us played back at school. One classmate whispers a message to the next one, on to the next, and when you hear the message read back at the other end of the chain, it has nothing to do with the original.
But media like email and SMS have one great advantage: the message is not verbal, but written. Simple forwarding without any modification requires far less effort than rewriting. Especially SMS, with its strictly confined format of text-only and 160 characters is ideally suited for the purpose. Those who doubt that are invited to take a closer look at some of the prize winners at last year’s DMAsia 2002 Awards. Campaigns like ‘God’ and ‘Gorillaz’ reached amazing results using VM tools, raising great awareness and overwhelming response with their respective target groups on relatively low budgets.
SMS is not the only medium that has seen VM applications. A spectacular example using e-cards as a medium is Singapore Airlines’ 1998 Chicago campaign. Traditional promotional methods pulled people towards a website from where they could send e-cards to friends and relatives, extolling the virtues of SIA’s new flight to Chicago. Within eight weeks, 3 million of those card where sent by almost 400,000 people from 200 countries, 70% of which came from viral spreading.
But SMS remains in the lead as the most preferred VM medium. This is attributable to its unrivalled speed and simplicity, not to mention the fact that everybody is always carrying his handphone. MMS adds to this a host of new possibilities, like pictures, videos, and interactive messages. Its use, however, will be impeded until MMS enabled handphones have reached sufficient penetration.
VM is not only relevant to those who are prepared to use it. Even traditional media are subject to power erosion on the part of the broadcasters. In the US, TV can now be received on a device called a Tivo, which enables users to view, stop, rewind and replay the action at any given moment in time, without having to record the programme first. And just over the horizon now is Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB), which will give radio listeners a host of similar features.
Soon, marketers need to be prepared to cede some of their power to their consumers. The marketing community will have to learn how to do that in a controlled way.
That last bit is absolutely necessary, because by now we all know what can go wrong if you delegate the power of message distribution to large numbers of people without putting controls in place. It is called spam.
posted by Jos. at Tuesday, July 01, 2003
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