Risk-taking online: success at viral marketing

This interview with Jim McNiven of respected viral agency Kerb first appeared in the book Targeting Students: A Marketing Guide (2005).

Sex. Violence. Humour. According to the rules of online viral marketing, you need at least one of these ingredients to make your campaign work. But Kerb, a Brighton-based digital marketing agency that does a lot of work for youth and student-orientated brands, doesn't take any notice of rules.

Kerb head Jim McNiven describes how they managed to get a warning message about the power of multinational corporations to the inboxes of over half a million people...while selling a few records at the same time.

"We were approached by the DJ Adam Freeland to create a website to promote his new band’s politically-aware debut single. The record, 'We Want Your Soul' by Free*Land, rails against consumerism and apathy.

"He wanted us to create something that would get people thinking about Free*Land's message and also provide an outlet for selling the track. It was a bit of a paradox - how do you sell a product that professes to be a comment on anti-consumerism to a bunch of cynical anti-capitalists!

"We know that to make something viral you have catch people's imagination, get them excited or interested. You also need a strong incentive to encourage them to forward the site to friends. We know that people like to compare and contrast with their friends.

"We created a site which led people to believe that two corporate giants had teamed up in a bid to buy people's souls. At the time it was in the news that Monsanto was close to decoding the human gene. We came up with the possibility that someone like Monsanto, with the financial backing of someone like Haliburton, could actually seek to 'buy' your soul. So we set about creating a site where two corporates had got together with that very aim. We couldn't say directly who they were, but we listed their real time share prices on the site, which gave a strong hint.

"We wanted to make people think: ‘Is this real?’ We wanted to create a wake up call, make people think this is something that could happen in the future.

"So the idea for the site was there, but we needed the extra hook, the feature that would get people to say to their friends, hey, you've got to check out this site.

"We came up with the idea of an online quotation form, similar to those sent out today by finance companies, but with echoes of the late Eighties when lenders were worried about dangerous lifestyles. It would determine the value of a visitor's soul by asking a series of questions. Do you eat fast food? Are you a practising Christian? Have you ever stolen anything of value? That kind of thing. Each answer would have a positive or negative impact on their soul's value and the visitor would end up with a quotation. They could then email their value to a friend and invite them to compare. After doing this they would be told they could raise the value of their own soul for a small fee - by buying the Free*Land single. There was a link through to a site selling the track.

"We've got a mailing list of 20,000 early adopters - people who like our content and want to be the first to receive it. It's a quality list. People are on it because they like getting viral content, not because they want to win some top-up vouchers or a holiday. We seeded the site there and waited to see what happened.

"Very quickly it was picked up by some crucial sites. It was on Guardian Online, Cruel.com, Popbitch and B3ta. Then all the blogs started picking up on it. It seemed every blog had a link to We Want Your Soul.

"We typed in the phrase 'We want your soul' into Google before we started and there were no returns. Within weeks of launching the site Google was registering 1,300 separate results! A month after launching we'd had 350,000 visitors. The hosting company, which had been arranged by Free*Land's management, pulled the site at one point, which is often the death knell for a viral piece because very few users will go back to a site later if they find it's down. But we got the site to a new host 24 hours later and it bounced back even stronger. To date it's had 563,819 visitors.

"There's so much crap talked about viral marketing. Half of what you see isn't viral. Viral is something that grows exponentially - you can send it to 200 people and it gets seen by 10,000. A viral campaign to a lot marketers means creating a poor bit of content for £10,000 and then spending £100,000 on banner ads trying to push traffic to it. Whereas you could spend £50,000 on content and get the best viral piece ever.

"There's a case for saying it's damaging the industry - this flooding of poorly-conceived creative. No-one's going to feel more affinity with a brand by playing some shonky platform game - the lack of creative thought that goes into it offends me. As viral specialists we're at risk of getting tarred with the same brush as all the amateurs that have come into viral marketing recently. Three of four years ago we were desperately trying to make people realise the potential; now I sit in front of marketing people who tell me: ‘This MUST go viral!’ It's become just a buzz word, without proper understanding of the nature of viral.

"But I'm still hugely evangelical about this method of advertising. You can hit half a million people with £5000, using something that people not only see but recommended to their friends. And there is so much freedom. If you make a funny TV ad, but it's a bit risque, people will complain. Online, it's self-censoring. If someone sends me something they know me, and they know I'll like it. No-one is going to send Kerb's wanking game to their granny or their 7-year-old nephew, but if they did it wouldn't be Kerb or the brand sponsoring the piece that would get the blame, it would be the sender.

"We did something for a top drinks brand - it was meant to be a lairy, crazy breakdancing game aimed at 16 to 30s. They made us take out any slight drug reference, anything vaguely sexual. Really minor things like a tent where you could see two people's feet hanging out. They said, look, we're a family brand we can't afford to offend people. We said to them: you can be more lairy online, because it's not going to be seen by anyone who'll be offended. I think youth brands will realise they can afford to be a bit more outrageous.

"You learn in viral marketing to go for the lowest common denominator. The success of We Want Your Soul was driven by the fact people liked to see what they were worth and compare that with friends. For a while, every blog site was asking: 'How much is YOUR soul worth?' It was a bit sad that everyone wanted to value their soul; I'd been really pleased with the creative as I thought it tapped into a really interesting topic for further thought, but basically its success was driven by people wanting to say 'Hey, guess what my soul's worth!'

"I don't know that we at Kerb are anymore in touch with the kids than our peers. Our success has come because of the fact we like to push it, like to see what we can get away with. Perhaps our influences have helped - our first office had four very anarchic little companies in it - a skate firm, a sound system, a t-shirt printer and us, and we probably benefited from that environment. There were dogs running loose, graffiti on the walls - it was a complete state. Clients used to wipe the feet when they left."