Warc, 20 June 2014
NEW YORK: A research team has successfully put numbers to a
form of earned media that previously seemed to be almost unquantifiable.
Michael T. Ewing, David B. Stewart, Dineli R. Mather and
Joshua D. Newton – all from Deakin University, Australia – outlined their
analysis in the June 2014 issue of the Journal of Advertising Research.
They proposed that viral campaigns may actually have a
statistical component providing marketers with insights into marketplace
effects.
In How Contagious Is Your Viral Marketing Campaign? A
Mathematical Model for Assessing Campaign Performance, the authors insist that
few peer-to-peer campaigns are purely viral – that marketers' messages are
organically reborn minute by minute on platforms like YouTube and Facebook.
Rather, there appear to be elements to these programmes that
can help anchor them in quantifiable, comparable metrics.
The authors begin with the assumption that "most
so-called 'viral' campaigns are made up of both viral and non-viral
components".
Among the techniques fitting the latter description are
"seeding" through mass-media advertising and direct mail – which are
"inherently non-viral activities" – and highly targeted sharing
though deliberate email distribution.
Building a mathematical model that separates the viral and
non-viral components of a campaign enables marketers to more accurately measure
the impact and cost-effectiveness of both contributing factors.
"In determining what contributed to the success of a
marketing campaign," Ewing, Stewart, Mather, and Newton advise,
"managers are cautioned not to overstate the contribution made by the
viral components.
"Rather, they should examine the relative contribution
that viral and non-viral processes make to the overall performance of their
campaigns."
Data sourced from Journal of Advertising Research
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