Black Ops Advertising. Mara Einstein

though, is that the technology has been created in such a way as to compel us to share information, and we are not sharing with one or two people, but more likely two or three hundred.³ A few hundred may still not seem like a lot, but if just a handful of people share with their friends, it can scale to reach as many people as some television programming. According to social media company Lithium, if a brand conversation reaches more than a thousand people, it can “generate up to half a million conversations about your brand,” which is the modern-day version of the so on and so on idea. To reach those numbers, marketers find (or pay for) “Superfans.” These well-connected, digitally plugged in folks generate three to five times more word of mouth (WOM) messages, and those messages are four times more likely to have an impact on purchase decisions.⁴ And most importantly, word-of-mouth recommendations are responsible for 20 to 50 percent of purchases, according to McKinsey & Company.⁵ Bottom line: companies need to get people talking about their product, and the more the better. Luckily for them, because of digital technology we share more content with more people than we ever have, more quickly and more often.⁶

      Perhaps unexpectedly, while it feels like we share an awful lot online, the vast majority of word of mouth happens in offline conversations. According to research from the Keller Fay Group, “91 percent of respondents’ information about brands came as a result of face-to-face conversations or over the phone.”⁷ While this is true, those offline conversations are facilitated by word of mouth marketing, and that marketing more than likely happened online. Word of mouth marketing is defined as “the technique of promoting a product, service or business by soliciting positive comments from satisfied customers. Word of mouth marketing is an interactive process such that customers are collaborating with the business, product or service for which they have derived enough satisfaction that they are willing to speak out about it and even recommend it to others.”⁸ Word of mouth marketing, then, asks consumers to talk about products and services. More often than not this will include some remuneration for us, like a coupon or a prize for having participated in a contest, and for Influencers repayment is typically free products or cash payments—a form of paid endorsement that we do not see.

      Marketers consider one person telling another about a product to be the most effective form of advertising because—not surprisingly—people trust their friends and family more than they trust an advertiser. According to Nielsen’s Trust in Advertising report, word of mouth is the most influential form of advertising, with 84 percent of respondents saying it was the most trustworthy.⁹ Word of mouth is integral to stealth forms of marketing because “peer group recommendation is the ultimate marketing weapon.”¹⁰ With WOM marketing, although the idea gets seeded by the marketer, consumers sell it to one another, and it doesn’t feel like marketing.

       WHAT WE SHARE

      Marketers have traditionally used a combination of what are called push and pull strategies. For push strategies, think about a pushy salesperson. They push the product on you. That is like the old broadcast media model. The opposite of that is a pull strategy, where consumers like the product so much that they help pull it through the distribution channel. That is what word of mouth marketing is all about. To facilitate WOM, marketers use a number of different tools to get us to engage with and then ultimately talk about their products.

      Marketing professor Colin Campbell and his colleagues developed a helpful way to categorize the types of messaging available, which is to delineate media based on two axes: (1) who created the content, and (2) whether the content was paid or unpaid.¹¹ Building on Campbell’s work, I have revised the template to reflect current terminology, as well as to present it as a tool for thinking about how different methods facilitate sharing.

       BRANDED CONTENT MESSAGING STRATEGIES

      Source: Based on Campbell et al (2014).

      Starting on the top line, content creators can be the brand (Coca-Cola, for example), a combination of the brand and the news media (Coca-Cola and the New York Times), the news media alone, or the user—that is, you and me. Unpaid content, or earned media, is publicity—for example, when a product is mentioned on a news story or an author appears on The Late Show—and paid media is, of course, advertising. Editorial content is the only element in the chart that is not—or at least not necessarily—influenced by corporate bias.

      Below, we will look at examples of word of mouth strategies, including viral videos, consumer-generated content, and sponsored word of mouth. Native advertising and content marketing, the most covert of the types, will be discussed in subsequent chapters. Bear in mind that the point of view, the bias of the content, changes based on the scenario. Given the example of Coke and the New York Times, imagine how different a story about Coke and obesity written by the newspaper would be from one that was paid for by the soda company.¹²

      Some of these categories are more driven by stealth than others, and not all marketing will be covert. It cannot be: we have to have some familiarity with a product in order for covert methods to work. That is why these methods rarely exist as standalone communications, but rather as part of an overall campaign.

      Procter & Gamble’s “Thank You Mom” campaign provides a helpful case study to see how the integration of online and offline, as well as of stealth and visible methods, can make a marketing effort effective. As part of this initiative, P&G bought traditional television commercials. These ads were originally created for the 2012 Olympics, and creatively they pull at the heartstrings by showing mothers from around the world doing tireless work in support of their children’s athletic careers. Prior to the TV advertising, the campaign started with unpaid media online in the form of a video called “Best Job,” which introduced the campaign and which became “a digital sensation.”

      The commercials and video were followed by an integrated segment (paid product placement) on NBC’s The Today Show. According to a document from P&G’s advertising agency: “Throughout the broadcast, the cast referenced the online popularity of ‘Best Job,’ aired the full 2-minute version within programming and additionally aired the :60 version in the ‘A’ position during the commercial break. The pièce de résistance was a P&G executive appearing on the show to surprise moms of Olympians with a financial gift to help them get to London (based on the insight that many families couldn’t afford the trip).”¹³

      Throughout the Olympic Games, social media (unpaid) was used in the form of a Thank You Mom Facebook page, a Twitter handle (@ThankYouMom), and YouTube videos. P&G created Facebook and Twitter pages to give mothers around the world an opportunity to post pictures of themselves with their children, and thus to create an emotional connection with the brand. In addition, athletes from around the world—many with extensive followings—posted thanks to their mothers. YouTube videos presented winning athletes and their moms. Some footage for these videos came from NBC, which agreed as part of the sponsorship contract to capture shots of mothers reacting to their children’s wins and losses.

      This outlines just some of the paid and unpaid methods that P&G used to grab our attention by pulling on our emotions. Some of these methods were stealth (the Today Show mentions, the mom footage as part of the Olympics), and much of it depended on consumer word of mouth. In terms of consumer engagement, there were 17 million views on YouTube, Facebook fans increased by 65 percent, and Twitter followers increased by 20 percent. The “Best Job” video was shared during the Olympics more than any other advertising, making it the most viral.

      In total, “Thank You Mom” became the most successful campaign in the company’s 175-year history, leading to more than $200 million in incremental sales. Like many marketing campaigns, a mix of media types, both covert and obvious, worked in conjunction with one another to bolster awareness and promote sales. For example, showing mothers in the stands at the Olympics is not outright advertising. However, throughout a hundred-day period leading up to the Olympics, consumers were bombarded with messages connecting moms and P&G. It stands to reason that many would think of the marketer’s advertising after seeing these images