Possible quote: `In a post-dotcom world, a company must propagate its message both cleverly and cheaply if it is to avoid ending up on the dot compost heap
In the days leading up to last Valentine's Day, an e-mail made the rounds of the country's offices, stirring up the kind of banter and diversion that these things usually do. It contained a link to a website: officeflirttest.com.
One click and you were on a nondescript, low-spec front page, where a series of multiple choice questions were listed beneath the banner headline "Are You the Office Flirt?" They ranged from the obscure to the provocative: "At school, did you prefer biology or PE? Is it possible to be `just friends' with someone you find attractive? Do you notice if people are wearing a wedding ring?" Once you completed the questionnaire, the site returned a narrative in which your social behaviour in the office was characterised as a particular animal: a monkey, dog, snake or whatever. The final line invited you to take your office flirtation to the next level and offered help in the form of another link. In seconds you are whisked away to Lastminute.com's page of Valentine offerings. It's a combination of viral and stealth marketing, and it's just one of the ways in which cost-conscious dotcoms are getting their message out there in these sophisticated times. Carl Lyons of Lastminute.com explains that the idea was borne of an understanding both of office Internet culture and the fascination people have for Cosmo-style questionnaires. "We wrote the questions in-house, we built the website ourselves, not using our professional designer, but just using a guy within the marketing department, because we wanted it to look as if it was something that had just appeared on the Internet, that a student in his bedroom in America might have written. Just like it appeared from nowhere. "If we had had fabulously high production values, it would have looked too glossy, people would have said, `Who's behind this, what's all this about?' Because there's an over-riding issue at stake . . . people are very marketing aware these days. They know about price deals, they know about sponsorship, they don't passively accept, they recognise when they're being marketed at and they judge your brand because of that."
In an online world jaded by the chainsaw subtlety of advertisers, deviousness is proving a highly successful marketing tool. Lyons explains how the e-mail was "seeded". "We put it out into the world just by getting people in our building and in our PR agency to send it, the URL, to their friends, but crucially not from our work addresses.
"For instance, I sent it to my friends from my Hotmail account. Now that's really important because it looks like something that again is not from lastminute.com . . . that way there's no trail when it gets round to show where it has come from. There are literally about 20 of us in the office that probably sent it out to a dozen friends or so . . . we sat watching the traffic stats, just quite astonished. . . . After it had been out three weeks or so, it had something like 1,000,000 page impressions and something like 150,000 unique users."
Other than saying that Valentine's Day was good for them, he won't be drawn on how these stats converted to sales, but at a time when online advertising continues to dry up, they represent something concrete, or at least as close to concrete as you will come to in a virtual world, that can be brought to potential advertisers. The global economic slowdown, as well as the dotcoms' fall from favour, has seen a cyclical reduction in the pace of advertising spending growth hit Internet companies hardest. To add salt to the wound, susceptibility to "traditional" banner advertising has reportedly evaporated; a click-through rate of 4 per cent of Net users a few years ago has fallen to 0.5 per cent today. In a typically American response, the Internet Advertising Bureau has sanctioned a series of new large format ads, including "skyscrapers", which will run up the sides of Web pages. It remains to be seen whether or not, in this context at least, size matters. But in a post-dotcom world, a company must propagate its message both cleverly and cheaply if it is to avoid ending up on the dot compost heap, which is why viral, or e-mail marketing has been such a popular vehicle. Because you can reach millions of people cheaply, your response rates don't have to be high. Dedicated companies have latched onto the power of word-of-mouth (or word of mouse) advertising by offering people freebies and special offers to recommend products and services to friends.
But the low barriers to entry that make this method of marketing so popular also curbs its effectiveness. A personal recommendation arriving from someone you know is one thing, an anonymous e-mail offering cheap finance is quite another. This morning's crop of junk in my inbox offered porn, cheap legal advice, debt consolidation services and a guaranteed cure for snoring. If I hadn't been writing this piece, they would never have been read; the bulk mail filter would have deleted them unseen within the month.
L90.com is a marketing company that sets a lot of store by viral methods. Lauren Kay, vice president of marketing, says, "The key in successfully building databases and creating a buzz through viral marketing, is to make sure there are some crucial checks and balances". Referral is incentivised, with incentives only delivered if the referral signs up too and the Spam potential is countered by limiting the number of referrals. "Marketers obtain immediate access to their new, targeted database and can then monetise those customers through new targeted promotions . . . The direct marketing ability of the Internet makes it the most effective communications and marketing vehicle we have ever seen."
But while this kind of strategising may yield bread and butter results, the holy grail of the viral marketer is the self propagator, the one that will lodge itself into the cultural landscape and be transformed into social currency. The Budweiser "Wassup" advert, though launched on TV, found a parallel existence on the Web. It was downloaded in its many forms from the beer company's site, and went speeding around the globe like Santa Claus on Christmas night. Not exactly under its own steam, but with the kind of internal energy that must have thrilled and surprised Budweiser executives in equal measure.
Diesel, the jeans company, is another which has hopefully lobbed a marketing snowball down the virtual slope and is hoping the momentum will evoke Budweiser's recent success. At Dailyafrican.com, it has created a world where Africa is filthy rich and decadent, while Europe is dirt poor and needy. There are bogus links to limousine hire firms and champagne dealers, articles about a "Euro-aid" concert and a button you can click to donate to impoverished Europeans. The only real-world brand name, planted ever so subtly around the site, is Diesel's. Bad taste or clever marketing? So long as brand awareness is increased in the ironic, too-cool-for-school idiom of the marketer, does it matter?
One last thing. Lastminute.com's Valentine's campaign had yet another element of stealth buried beneath its surface. All of the results generated were random. Go back and re-enter all the same choices twice and the site will return two different characterisations. Whatever pop psychological deduction the whole thing inferred wasn't really there. Pass it on.