Chuck Porter speaks about “The Secret of Viral Marketing”

Oct 11 2006

Chuck Porter, Chairman of Crispin, Porter, & Bogusky – arguably the hottest agency in the world right now, spoke at OMMA East today about the success of his agency and the secret of viral marketing.

In his presentation, Porter brought up examples of how the world is moving so fast that a big news story hits for a few hours and then that person / story is forgotten about. This is often true of ”memorable” ad campaigns. The lifespan of great ad campaigns has gotten shorter and shorter with so much noise out there, especially with user-generated content. In fact, one panelist on ”The Creative Panel” pointed out that 90% of big box-office Hollywood films fail, so why expect all TV advertising to succeed? Coming up with and executing upon a big idea is exceedingly difficult and there needs to be a tolerance around how to define success.

The Secret of Viral Marketing

No one wants to be bored. Follow Plato’s advice where he wrote “There is NO learning without emotion.”

It needs to be creative, entertaining, or informational – enough for people to feel third-party validation from sending something unique, authentic to a friend.

Case Study: Burger King’s Subservient Chicken
www.subservientchicken.com
This site launched 3 years ago and within 12 days, there were 100 million hits to the site and the average amount of time spent on the site per user was 7 minutes. 3 years later, there have been a total of 460 million hits and it completely resonates with the 16-25 year old male demographic who are powereaters at Burger King.

More Chuck Porter advice:

You can’t hide online.

Stay loose and back winners – as long as a campaign is HOT, back it. But, be very sensitive to pull the campaign before it gets stale. This is a tight balancing act.

Have one voice.

Go overboard with your idea.

To see the video clips of Chuck Porter’s presentation AND to see his entire presentation via video, go to OMMA’s specific webpage here to check it out>>