Viral Silliness: It's Not A Control Issue
By David Hanson, Pres. H2M

By now you’ve probably seen the two guys in white lab coats that drop Mentos mints into bottles of Diet Coke and make a fountain.  I have to chuckle at the “success” of this viral amateur-made video that is going around and how it is featured on the front of Advertising Age and other marketing trade sources both online and offline. I live in Fargo, North Dakota, so maybe I just don’t get as worked up over stuff like this like they do in New York. After all, we ice fish to entertain ourselves, which is just as silly as tossing mints in a bottle of Coke. I even read that Mentos sales spiked up 15%, but I’m guessing that most of those mints are being dropped in Coke bottles than actually being eaten. It’s all good fun.

The national advertising trade publications and especially the online marketing ‘news and opinion’ sites, however, think it’s all about ‘control’ of the brands. That’s just silly. They miss the point because they’re just simply thinking too hard about it. It’s really just about a silly water fountain made with pop bottles to get attention and maybe make a buck. Plus, they are elevating these virals about low-involvement mass-consumer goods, which are just a small part of the total economic landscape, as the paradigm for ALL business, which is absurd. But more on that later. Mentos and Coke have nothing to do with it other than it lets us know the right combination with which to make a nice sticky mess. After seeing the clip and reading ad nauseum about how the “consumer is now in control’ I went to the official Coke site and sure enough there’s the two guys now with about 6 more clips produced by Coke including fakey ‘outtakes’ of these fellas talking etc. It’s not funny anymore. How could it be?  It’s a one-pony trick and they’ve already tried to bottle it.

I’m an ad agency owner and also a  commercial writer/producer and I keep reading that I should shudder in terror at these virals and that the ‘consumer is in control’ and my agency is a dinosaur and will disappear from planet earth in short order. It’s funny though, because I don’t feel threatened by it as a form of marketing that will strip me or my company of our professional worth. Heck, who hasn’t had lots of goofy ideas for commercials but just never really acted on them. So people are buying more Mentos to make fountains out of pop bottles. Great. Sure it’s interesting. Sure, there’s a nice little blip in marketing totally out of the blue and in no one’s ‘control’.  But does this really mean the consumer is in ‘control’? Again, I read the trades and I understand the sensationalism about it all, but I also have a functioning brain and I just don’t see the crisis.

In the more disciplined world of professional marketing, the ‘viral’ has long had another name. It was called a “one-off”; one clever idea that makes you laugh and watch it a couple of times and then send it on or at least tell people so you can be the best joke-sender of the day.  But does the Mentos/Coke viral make people want to buy Mentos or Coke for more than anything than make a fountain? I doubt it. Is there great name recognition and awareness for the short term? You bet. Will there be residual mint and Coke sales because of it? Probably not.. Most of the kids watching it aren’t excited about Mentos and Coke other than how big a fountain they can make.

There is a vast difference between ‘one-offs’ and professional marketing work. Every human being is a fountain of creativity in some area. There are millions of amateur musicians, artists and writers and filmmakers who can put out an occasional brilliant piece of work. It is equally well documented that the hardest album for any musical act is the follow-up to their hit album, their sophomore attempt. One hit-wonders litter the creative landscape. The trick, however, is to keep doing the good relevant stuff over time and on time and on budget.

Ok, so the big national ad trade magazines are telling me my agency is losing relevance, that if we don’t “get hip” we’ll be a dinosaur. They tell companies that they no longer have any control over their brands that the consumer is in control. Gee, a little proof might be in order here. Since when has the consumer NOT  been in control? Since when have agencies and brands thought they could manipulate people to fork over their hard earned money by trickery and ‘slickness'? Control of a brand doesn’t lie just in the brand communications. Control of a brand is more about performance and fulfilling the promise to a consumer than about the advertising anyway and always has been. A viral might be able to bring short burst of attention to a brand but only time will tell if an unknown brand can be sustained.
Once again, a reality check is in order from the ‘real world, where most advertising agencies and their clients live.

These days there’s too much stuff to buy and not enough people to buy it, and that’s just one reason why there are more service industries popping up every day than manucturers. Our agency handles a lot of professional service businesses and I can’t imagine a viral appearing, for example, for the large attorney firm we represent that would do a thing for helping or hurting their brand.

It sure seems to me to be a pretty silly waste of time for me to sit in Fargo, North Dakota and speculate, discuss and prognosticate and worry about what the ‘big boys’ with their national low-involvement consumer product brands and their ad agencies are getting into such a tizzy about. They truly live in a world apart from the rest of us live with our service clients that plug along day after day working on real-world problems in local and regional markets that require more than a funny viral to make a difference on the bottom line.

By the way, you can bet these guys in the Mentos/Coke virals are getting some big salary offers from some of the major ad agencies in the world right now for a college prank. Oh well, my clients are waiting, and we’ve got a lot of real work to do to help them move forward.

dave@h2m.biz
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David Hanson
Pres. H2M
dave@h2m.biz