When companies learn to let the buzz be...

Call it what you like-talk value, buzz, viral marketing, word of mouth…It all boils down to the idea of wild, genuine popularity, popularity moreover that is not artificial and forced but organic and merit-based. The topic of this post is the relationship, sometimes symbiotic and sometimes strained, between viral content and the corporations that benefit from it.

Time and again, a lone citizen comes up with something, often a short film, that catches the zeitgeist wave perfectly. Where it gets hairy is when these pop phenomena contain brand names, like iPod or Budweiser. What happens when a third party comes along and without really meaning to stumbles onto the set of some vast corporate marketing drama? Will it be “cease and desist” or an open-arms embrace? It depends on the company, of course, but I think many corporations are realizing that real buzz is hard to create in a laboratory, so when it comes along they do best to leave it be.
Take for example the recent famed video clip about the Apple iPod by George Masters, with its inspired .mp3 soundrack playing “Tiny Machine” in the background? Nobody at Apple had anything to do with its creation, but contrary to expectation they have not attempted to shut out the wildly popular clip. Yet it was created not because the author had any financial interest in the iPod, but rather as a promotional sample of his work that tapped into something he, and others, already identified with. Using a brand can be a kind of direct synaptic shortcut to connecting a designer with the public, rather like how novelists make readers identify with a character by having them drink a Coke or a Bud Lite.
Bud Lite, it so happens, was the beneficiary of an eerily similar viral buzz fest way back in 1999-2000, when an aspiring film director, Charles Stone III, made a short film about a group of friends who call each other, each one saying “Whassup?” The answer is of course, “I’m just sitting here drinking a Bud.”
Both accidental viral ad campaigns meant a bump to the company’s bottom line-Bud actually used the “Whassup?” short as a SuperBowl commercial. It's advertising agency, DDB, estimated Bud got $20 million in free advertising.
But what happens when companies try to create viral crazes from whole cloth? Is ‘buzz’ quite as sweet when it is created by Madison Avenue? Some companies have gotten away with it, mimicking grassroots pop film shorts and spoofs with ad campaigns like Burger King’s “The Angus Diet” and “Subservient Chicken” (see previous posts), or the “Superman” films with Jerry Seinfeld by American Express. But I think by and large the public is suspicious when corporate America tries to ‘narc the buzz’ and try to come at consumers through the back door, pretending to be just one of the guys.
I am betting that the smartest corporations will react to ground-up viral content from outsiders (as long as it is not offensive) by both sparing the hapless creator the traditional corporate iron fist approach and keeping their hands off the creative.