And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [51]
Word-of-mouth marketing is a response to a problem that, at the convention, was laid out succinctly in a slide by Peter Kim, an analyst for Forrester Research. It is a problem with conventional advertising, which no longer works the way it once did. In just the four years between 2002 and 2006, based on Forrester surveys, the percentage of Americans who said that “Ads are a good way to learn about products” had dropped more than twenty-five points, from 78 percent to 52 percent. Similar drops were evident in how many Americans said they “buy because of ads,” or said that “companies tell the truth in ads.” It is partly a problem of dwindling attention, and rising clutter—as marketing guru Seth Godin points out in his book Permission Marketing , a single visit to a supermarket entails suffering through a barrage of ten thousand advertising messages. It is also a problem of increased sophistication, of consumers having internalized the visual and rhetorical tricks of advertising and having learned to tune them out.
But behind this dark problem twinkled the rays of opportunity. The good news was delivered by Ed Keller, the president of WOMMA’s board of directors, and Brad Fay, whose firm, Keller Fay, does sophisticated tracking of consumers’ conversations. In a program called TalkTrackTM, the firm had recruited almost four thousand consumers to record twenty-four-hour diaries of all their conversations, both online and offline. The consumers made notes in these diaries whenever “marketing-relevant” topics came up—from within sixteen sectors ranging from dining and beverages to health care and public affairs—and, better yet, whenever specific brands were mentioned. The results were tantalizing to the crowd, and over the following days at the conference I heard them cited over and over again, in particular these two, simplest statistics:
FIG. 4-1—CONVERSATION: THE MARKETING MOTHERLODE?
What makes these conversational mentions so enticing is that unlike ads, consumers seem to act on them: Messrs. Keller and Fay found that in more than three-quarters of instances, the receiver of a brand mention deemed the information to be “highly credible” or “fairly credible,” and in nearly as many cases—65 percent—the recipients said they were “highly likely” or “somewhat likely” to buy based on the information.
Thus quantified, the personal conversations of average Americans suddenly stood glimmering before the assembled marketers like empty billboards, waiting to be emblazoned for corporate gain. Conversations were the new advertising frontier, and the conference’s small-group presentations all concerned themselves with how to rush in and stake a claim. The simplest approach was video ads, made just like television spots but intended purely to go viral online. But almost everyone wanted to go even further. A number of intrepid companies, including Pepsi, Jeep, Sprint, and Heinz Ketchup, had launched programs by which consumers could make their own ads, so much did they presumably love the brands in question. More common were special sites with branded entertainment, designed to draw consumers into a “relationship,” no matter how mundane the product. Kraft Foods made an elaborate site for “St. Arvin” University (starvin’—get it?) with collegethemed videos. Hanes Socks created an animated online poker game where one’s opponents were sock puppets. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter launched an incredibly elaborate site that included guest voices by Fabio and an appallingly terrible animated soap opera with a butter-substitute theme.
Ford, as it happens, had gotten into this particular act too; at the time of the conference it was running an elaborate website called Ford Bold Moves, which described itself as follows: “Ford Bold Moves is a video documentary series that takes you inside Ford Motor Company as it attempts one of the largest corporate turnarounds in history. . . . Bold Moves also involves you in the