When we say ‘going viral’ in relation to an advert, we mean that knowledge of the existence of the advert is transferred from person to person to person (often independent of the product that is being advertised), and that the population which infected with the meme rises exponentially. This, of course, is what marketers want, because knowledge of the product is carried along with the spread of the advert. The advert is just the container meme.
But I suspect there are no more than one or two adverts a year that achieve viral growth. However, most adverts are not further replicated and are not themselves memes.
That failure occurs because these adverts are not good in memetic terms. 'Good', as you will remember, means that have a success factor significantly greater than one. These adverts do not pass through the brain’s filters – they just aren’t distinctive, novel, interesting, coherent, or useful.
There are a lot of adverts competing for your attention, even if you disregard other types of competing meme. If you watch three hours of TV a day, which is considerably lower than the measured averages in some countries, then you are probably exposed to 20,000 television adverts per year. You can easily treble that figure once you take into account radio, newspaper, magazine, billboards and Internet advertising. It’s very hard for an advert to be noticed at all amidst all this noise, and most of them (if they are noticed at all) never get retained by the brain and so cannot be spread further.
The consequence of this failure to spread memetically is the need for mass advertising. In a meme-based advertising campaign, it would only be necessary to expose the advert to a small number of people and then wait until everyone has seen it. Because that doesn’t happen, everyone has to be exposed to the advert a large number of times in an attempt to make it stick to their brains.
Advertising fatigue
Even where the container meme (the advert) is good enough to the the payload noticed, saturation effects occur.
For example, Shachar and Anand (1998) conducted a detailed study of ‘tune-in’ adverts by television companies for their future programmes. These programmes could be an extension of an existing product, such as a second series of a successful show, or could new products, such as special programmes or a new series. Shachar and Anand identified that:
- adverts for shows that viewers that were likely to be aware of but needed reminding about (such as a second series of a show) were highly successful. The first exposure to an advert increases the probability of watching the show by more than 41%; the second exposure increases this probability by an additional 29%, and the third by about 17%. However, the sixth and subsequent exposures decreased propensity to view the programme;
- adverts for new shows did not work as quickly (first airing of the advert increased propensity to view by 23% rather than 41%) but saturation effects did not kick in until the tenth viewing; and
- targeting the tune-in worked well, for example advertising a new sitcom alongside an existing one.
According to AdAge, two companies (Ford and GM) spent $3.2bn on TV advertising in America in 2010, accounting for 15% of TV advertising revenues. That’s a lot of money - to put it into a very bitter context, it’s about eight times the national spend on research into Alzheimer’s disease.
Consultants Booz Allen Hamilton charted the pattern of media spend in the United States (on television, on radio, in newspapers, and in magazines) for all automobile brands sold between 1998 and 2004. They found (see Hirsh and Schweizer (2005)) that it was possible to predict the saturation point that delivered the highest profit per brand and therefore the optimum advertising spend. Increasing media spend beyond the saturation point had no clear effect on sales, but that didn’t seem to stop many of the major players.
While there were increases in advert placement cost over the period of study, the vast increase in advertising spend was driven by overcapacity in the market – in other words, too many makes of cars competing for too few buyers. Annual vehicle sales rose by about 20% over that seven year period, but there was an estimated 1000% increase in marketing spend (of which only 70% could be attributed to increasing placement costs). In other words, automobile manufacturers got into an advertising spending war that had made the media companies and agencies richer but did not help them at all.
Remember this
To sum up, adverts do work, up to a point. Saturation sets in, and there is no point repeating the adverts beyond the saturation point. Indeed, there is some evidence that it is counterproductive, as irritation with the constant repetition reduces propensity to ‘buy’ the product. Finally, advertising spend is not subjected to the same kinds of management discipline as other areas, and can be obscenely wasteful.