Virality and the Success of Online Campaigns
By Jasmine Subrata
Online advertising has becoming a breeding ground for both small businesses and large corporations. The Internet not only supplies a global market, but an interactive audience that generates the exposure independently. It is no surprise that now advertisers create campaigns with the sole purpose of ‘going viral’, and placing more emphasis on the hedonistic values in online content compared to traditional television advertising. According to Petrescu & Korgaonkar (2011), the term viral advertising is defined as “unpaid electronic (e-mail, Web, or social media) distribution of business or user generated advertisements from consumer to consumer, based on ad content likeability, entertainment, and controversial characteristics.” With the plethora of original and thought-provoking online advertisements, consumers now are more engaged than ever. Especially the generation brought up with technology, whose sobriquets range from the ‘digital natives’, ‘millennials’, to ‘e-Mavens’. The success of an online campaign is dependent on the emotions provoked and this generation’s predilection to share compelling content for their own personal growth.
In 2012, Berger and Milkman conducted a study that enforced the relationship between specific emotions and virality. They discovered that content that stimulates high-arousal emotions such as awe, anxiety, or anger will lead to higher shares than low-arousal emotions such as sadness. This is due to the high-arousal emotions acting as a motivator to forward the content along. Anxiety and anger-inducing stories and videos are more likely to be shared. The viral ads itself have distinct characteristics that allows them to incite these emotions—characteristics that are underplayed in television commercials due to passivity. Classical viral advertisements have a catchy message, stir controversy, are entertaining, and have engagement levels that are often associated with humor (Petrescu & Korgaonkar 2011). The advertisers set out to create a positive association between the brand and the consumer, in other words, it’s all about the image. This subconscious link between the two has a better impact when the ads are commercial-free and appear to purely be for entertainment purposes as opposed to an ad presenting a call-to-action.
The measure of success of a viral campaign depends mainly on the initial objectives set out by the client. In an interview with social media manager Clarinta Subrata (25 April 2014), she expounded that online campaigns can be considered successful in one aspect but fail in another. Virality is a great way for brand awareness, but does not necessarily ensure sales or action. If the objective of the campaign was to garner global attention, then the view count would be the principal measure of success. However if there was a sales objective, then the success would be measured by the sales. She noted that Metro Safety’s Dumb Ways to Die campaign reached over 80 million views on YouTube, branched out to different media platforms and won numerous awards. But the gamut of its success is not measured by its reach but by the statistical data surrounding train safety, and the subsequent 21 percent reduction of fatalities and injuries on Melbourne’s Metro trains surely proved its success. Management reports such as Google Analytics and Facebook Insights also prove to be an invaluable tool to optimize an online campaign. “When evaluating results, we always evaluate if the action we want people to take, has been taken. With these information, we can optimize and tweak the campaign to get better results,” explained Subrata(2014).
Forwarding content not only generates awareness for the brand but it reflects the sharer as an altruistic and influential individual. Viral advertising is not only about putting a brand forward in social transmissions but it is about what the advertisement represents to the consumer as an individual (Ho & Dempsey 2010). The amount of online content shared by any one person gives insight to his or her psychographic profile, which attributes to the notion that sharing has individualistic roots. Those who are willing to share online content see themselves as opinion leaders, and due to their disposition to stand out from the crowd, they are more likely to be judged as more influential. Another factor behind a consumer’s prompt to share is their altruism. Sharing information is a means of expressing love or friendship, and it is posited by Ho & Dempsey that consumers are driven by altruistic motives both in online and offline environments (2010). With the rise of social media, interpersonal relationships have never been so efficient, and the intimacy and emotional involvement of the real world has shifted online. However, the act of forwarding online content spans more than individualism and altruism, but curiosity as well. It is noted that the inherent characteristic of curiosity is linked to learning, which allows certain individuals to consume and forward more content than their fellow digital natives.
It is important to understand that even though viral advertising can reach a global audience, it is still susceptible to negative buzz. The content that consumers share can be one of awe, but it can also be one generated by anger. Both are highly shareable, but the latter could lead of explosive self-generating ruin for the brand (Dobele, Toleman & Beverland 2005). The consumers play a large role in the virality of a campaign, and there is more psychological reasoning behind the view counts than previously thought. The prior dichotomy of consumers and advertisers is now inextricably linked, and the consumers are no longer passive audiences like they were with television commercials. In the words of Bill Bernbach, “Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make.”