Book extract: Viral Loop
By Adam L Penenberg
Published: November 6 2009 14:24 | Last updated: November 6 2009 14:24
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| Businesses are keen to harness the digital world to extend their brands and increase sales |
It was the autumn of 2005 when Fritz Grobe, a professional juggler, and Stephen Voltz, a trial lawyer, first heard from a friend the amusing revelation that if you dropped Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke, it would explode. Performers at heart – the two were members of a regional theatre company in Buckfield, Maine – Grobe and Voltz went out to the backyard to try it. After the pyrotechnics, their first thought was: how far could they take it?
They weren’t the first. For decades, high school students had mixed vinegar and baking soda to make volcanoes erupt at science fairs and, since the early 1990s, the people at Mentos had been aware of the geyser phenomenon, which would come and go in popularity. Then, in September 2005, science educator Steve Spangler demonstrated the Mentos-Diet Coke effect on a news programme in Denver, Colorado, with the anchor Kim Christiansen getting soaked in the process. The online video became a minor hit.
In Buckfield, Grobe and Voltz spent a morning playing around with the idea. After corralling as many bottles of Diet Coke and Mentos as they could, they constructed a 10-bottle fountain with the aid of some cement blocks and put on a show at the nearby Oddfellows Theatre for other members of their troupe. The response urged them to greater heights and they spent about five months experimenting – cutting slits in bottles, drilling holes, adding screens.
YouTube’s top viral videos
After settling on the idea of recreating the Bellagio Fountain in Las Vegas, the two drafted blueprints and carefully choreographed their effects to match those of their glitzy muse. On April 29 2006, they laid out 200 bottles of Diet Coke in an intricate design and prepped more than 500 Mentos mints (total cost: $300), then spent eight hours doing walk-throughs. “It felt like blowing up a building,” Grobe says. “We had one chance. We had never done more than 20 bottles at a time before that.”
While a friend with a digital video camera recorded the action, the two, dressed in white lab coats, crossed their fingers and let it fly. Amazingly, it all went off without a hitch. It was an unseasonably warm day, so the effects were even more spectacular, especially at the end when the grand crown shot out in different directions and spun. They got soaked, puddles of Diet Coke gathering in their goggles.
On the first Saturday in June they posted the experiment to their website. Voltz told one person about it: his brother. Within hours, thousands of visitors were viewing “Experiment #137”. By the end of the first day, they counted 14,000 downloads. Two days later, The Late Show with David Letterman called. Grobe told producers they had only done the fountain once and would need a chance to rehearse. Over the next few weeks, Grobe and Voltz grew confident they could perform the Mentos geyser live. Meanwhile, the video became a runaway hit. Over nine days, more than 2m people logged on to their site.
The concept of collective curation has been around for thousands of years; it just didn’t have as sophisticated a propulsion system as it does today. At first it was verbal, with gossip and information spreading from person to person. Chain letters mailed through the nation’s postal system urged recipients to make copies and send to 10 other people, or suffer the consequences. Then there was the telephone, the first efficient person-to-person mode of communication, which, before the rise of the internet, offered an unprecedented level of virality.
Once Mosaic and Netscape seeded the viral plain, though, jokes, memes and information that touched someone’s heart or funny bone – or both – could be dispatched to dozens, if not hundreds of people in an instant. It was only a matter of time before businesses began to recognise the benefits of viral campaigns to extend their brands and, in the process, increase sales. They just had to figure out how.
The answer came from Burger King in the form of a guy dressed up as a chicken willing to do whatever you wanted. The brainchild of ad agency Crispin Porter and Bogusky in 2004, the “subservient chicken” was one of the first mega-successful corporate viral campaigns. There were some wacky television spots, but it was the ensuing interactive web campaign that turned it from idle curiosity into a phenomenon.
Crispin launched a website with the chicken in a living room, encouraging visitors to type commands and watch him perform them, as long as they corresponded to one of more than 300 pre-recorded moves – from a cartwheel to a Michael Jackson moonwalk. But the chicken would draw the line at anything obscene (such as a sex act), approaching the camera to wag his finger in disapproval.
Within a week, the chicken hosted more than 20m visits, with the average user spending an astonishing 5 minutes and 44 seconds on the site. More to the point, sales of Burger King chicken sandwiches increased 9 per cent a week in the month following the site’s launch.
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Pete Healy, vice-president of marketing at Mentos, heard about the geyser phenomenon on radio. He told a reporter that Mentos was “tickled” by the video. He called Grobe and asked if there was anything the company could do to help.
“Send Mentos,” Grobe replied.
Healy did more than that. What followed was a marketing coup that has become a textbook example of how a company can harness the power of viral video, where the 30-second TV ad, which is waning in influence, is replaced by the audience. Because collective curation means the audience alone decides what’s good and what should be watched while the traditional gatekeepers – TV networks, movie studios, news media – are pushed to the sidelines.
Although Healy knew there would be risks to involving Mentos in this type of new-media campaign, in the end Mentos was candy, not a cure for cancer. How much effort would people put into ridiculing it? “As long as we maintained a light touch and were authentic, we figured we would probably be OK,” he says.
When Grobe and Voltz appeared on Letterman’s show, Healy dispatched the Mentos-mobile, a Pontiac Solstice wrapped in Mentos graphics, which was parked outside the theatre, while street marketers toting six-foot rolls of Mentos gave out sweets to passers-by.
Unlike Healy, the people at the Coca-Cola Company didn’t know what to think. A Coke spokeswoman said: “We would hope people want to drink [Diet Coke] more than try experiments with it.” She added that the “craziness with Mentos” didn’t “fit” Diet Coke’s “brand personality”.
Michael Donnelly, the company’s interactive director, admitted that Coke wasn’t prepared for this. But in July 2006 the soft- drink maker relaunched Coke.com with a new focus: consumer-generated media that celebrates creativity and self-expression. Within days of starting his job at Coke, Donnelly contacted Voltz and Grobe. This led to a meeting between Coke, Mentos, Grobe, Voltz and Google, which also wanted in on the action.
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| Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz told one person about ‘Experiment #137’; after nine days, 2m had downloaded it |
This democratisation of content is made possible by cheap video cameras, camcorders and mobile phones that capture user-generated infotainment, aided by powerful software like Final Cut Pro and iMovie to shape it, and distributed via a massive digital infrastructure with ample bandwidth. The technological zeitgeist is, however, equal parts human, as online communities blog about what interests them or disseminate links to everyone in their e-mail address books. Meanwhile, user communities have sprouted up on people portals such as MySpace, Flickr, YouTube and Digg. There, people share everything from blog posts to news articles, pictures, audio podcasts and videos in a quest for their own 15 megabytes of fame.
“It’s all about the combination of next-generation content creation and distribution coupled to instant access to your social network community,” says Adam Lavelle, vice-president of strategy for iCrossing, a digital marketing agency. “Because distribution is so huge and fluid and easy, your community connects to other communities, which fosters this distribution. If I know you, then I know everyone you know.”
As for companies caught up in a viral loop, they have little choice but to let go of their brand. As AG Lafley, chief executive of Procter & Gamble, once told the US Association of National Advertisers, “The more in control we are, the more out of touch we become. But the more willing we are to let go a little, the more we’re finding we get in touch with consumers.”
A company willing to let go of its brand can find untapped riches, as Mentos did. The Bellagio Fountain video was downloaded 20m times and more than 10,000 copycat videos were posted online, which created a multiplier effect: Mentos tallied a staggering 215m mentions of its product in TV, print or radio stories over nine months, and estimates the free publicity was worth $10m to the company, half its annual marketing budget. Sales climbed 20 per cent during the first viral wave and, even after the commotion died down, they remained 15 per cent higher than they had been. Mentos made a mint.
Before the video, Diet Coke’s sales had been flat, while the company as a whole was losing market share. But Donnelly reports that after it went viral there was a “significant spike” in sales of two-litre bottles of Diet Coke, the ones used on camera. He wouldn’t give exact numbers but confirmed it was between 5 and 10 per cent.
On YouTube some videos have been downloaded tens of millions of times. There is a cat playing the piano , a music video set on treadmills at a gym, a cackling baby. At first there may not seem any rhyme or reason behind their appeal. Yet there are shared characteristics to some viral videos, and companies seeking to advertise their products are keen to decipher these.
A series created for the Sony Bravia HDTV featured explosions of paint covering whole buildings, thousands of bouncing balls and giant clay rabbits, all in vivid colour; a Dove Evolution ad showed a normal-looking woman instantly transformed into a supermodel before our very eyes. The tagline read: “No wonder our image of beauty is distorted.”
These are the antithesis of the hard sell. In exchange for entertaining us, the companies are afforded the privilege of mentioning their product. The narrative of each video is woven tightly into the brand’s message. Sony’s ad played up the Bravia’s colour and image clarity. Dove’s idea expanded the idea of beauty to encompass more than twiggy supermodels. On YouTube alone, several parodies were viewed a total of 5m times. (“Slob Evolution”, in which a male model eats, drinks and smokes himself into someone who resembles Christopher Hitchens, is a personal favourite.)
Plenty of others have played the system, with decidedly mixed results. Samsung released a series of videos on YouTube featuring a Saint Bernard named Sam on an aeroplane. The few who actually watched characterised these ads as “lame”, “a stinker” and “zzzzzz”. And though Dove scored big with Evolution, another promo for Dove Cream Oil Body Wash received more than 10,000 comments on YouTube, almost universally negative.
What’s the secret of a campaign like this? “You have to have a light touch and be careful not to act like a guy in his mid-40s trying to be a hipster,” says Pete Healy, the fifty-something Mentos marketer. “It doesn’t smell right.”
This is an edited extract from ‘Viral Loop’ by Adam L Penenberg, (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99). © 2009 Adam Penenberg.
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Adam L Penenberg on what’s next for the virtual economy
One need not be fluent in the lingua franca of social media to realise that Facebook is viral through and through. From the start it grew because each new user begat others, for what’s the sense of being on Facebook if none of your friends are? Today there are more than 300m Facebookers and it is en route to half a billion.
Facebook not only constantly expands, stacked atop it is a teeming ecosystem of thousands of social networking applications: games, horoscopes and quizzes, apps for business and charity, all of them also viral in nature. With 25m users, one notable Facebook app is the gruesome game Mafia Wars. Users start their own mafia family with their friends, operate crime syndicates and shoot to be the next Godfather.
While the script isn’t all that interesting, the gamemaker Zynga’s revenue scheme is, because it turns bits and bytes into cold hard cash by trading in virtual goods, which yield about half the company’s revenue (advertising is responsible for the other half). Zynga combines free-market capitalism with high-tech killing hardware. Need an assault rifle for your arsenal? Pay Zynga real money and it’s yours. How about a “meat grinder” machine gun, an Easter egg bomb or napalm? Yours, for your next ambush, at a price.
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Even more popular is Farmville, enabling its 60m users to buy digital representations of seeds, chickens, eggs, tools and plots of land. (While neither game runs exclusively on Facebook – they are also available on MySpace, Yahoo and over the iPhone – Facebookers form the biggest base of users.)
Don’t laugh. The market for virtual goods is estimated to be about $1bn in the US. It is spawning entire virtual economies, even being funnelled into charitable causes. Zynga released a special “sweet seed” it sold for the equivalent of $5 each, promising to donate half the proceeds to two non-profits in Haiti. Farmville players generated $640,000, with $320,000 going to charity.
These games, like the social networks they sit on, are viral, with each user attracting others to play. They will not only continue to spread, they will become more realistic and it’s not far-fetched to think that one day an alternate economy could arise.
SuperFreakonomics
offers much the same range and amiability, but is more polished. The
book’s chapters cover prostitution; data analysis in healthcare and
counter-terrorism; altruism; innovation; and geo-engineering. The
reader may not guess the central topic from the chapter titles or the
opening pages, however, which betray a fondness for springing surprises
and putting twists in the storytelling.
It’s
hard to meet the bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert without picturing
her collapsed in tears on the floor of a suburban bathroom. That’s the
image that opens her 2006 book Eat, Pray, Love, and one that
seems to stick in the minds of more than 5m readers, from Oprah fans to
book-clubbers to New York subway users, about a fifth of whom seemed to
be reading the book on their commutes this spring. 
Just
about every human decision about the future is tainted by a gap — the
difference between what we think we know and what we actually know. The
more expert we are, the wider the gap is likely to be. The story below,
an excerpt from the book Dance with Chance, is a classic
example of an expert-busting enterprise. The experts in this case are
highly sophisticated statisticians and professors who are using
up-to-date models. Most of us assume that sophistication helps us
understand the future. But in fact, sophistication makes things worse;
it invites misplaced focus on the complicated. In the end, if we expect
to make better decisions, we would do well to internalize the lesson in
this passage. That doesn’t mean relying on common sense. It might mean
looking for experts who understand the limits of what they know and the
relative value of simpler methods.
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