Tore Claesson: Viral is not a strategy. It’s a lottery.

Apple’s famous 1984 TV spot reached around 38,000,000 eyeballs watching the Superbowl the only day it ran.

YouTube has added  5,879,629 viewers since, (as of November 1, 2010).

Nike “write the future” has to date 21,350,482 views .

That’s almost 4 times more than Apple’s 16 year old TV spot. On YouTube.

But also way below Apple’s original Super Bowl viewership.

The soccer world cup was watched by close to 100 million Americans, so worldwide I reckon the Nike spot must be among the most watched TV spots ever.

Even though Nike and its agency probably hoped that viral would be huge with Rooney playing a fat old loser, it was first and foremost a TV spot, aimed at an enormous TV audience worldwide. Nobody would spend so much money on speculation of possible viral spread.

However. Arguing that viral is for free is a faulty argument. Aside from crappy and crazy home videos that for strange and largely unpredictable reasons go viral big time, the cost of producing anything worthwhile isn’t exactly gratis.

And predicting anything to go viral is not a media strategy any professional would even dream of recommending.

YouTube is basically a total guess. Nobody might see your ad. While a big TV event with a huge audience guarantees your ad will have  a certain predicted reach in the millions.

Reach is of course not the same as effectiveness. It’s just a possibility.

Of Apple’s Super Bowl ads, 1984 is the only one anyone seems to remember. The follow up ad the year after,  “Lemmings”,  reached just as many people. But it’s not at all as well or fondly remembered. YouTube views are a dismal 32,000 plus.

Today all the rage is , as nobody could have missed, all about social, web and interactive. Although, as an advertising channel the web is still rather small. And the efficacy is still largely debated. No major brand has yet been built on the web alone, aside from web brands such as Google, Amazon and Zappos.

To get anywhere near so called traditional media in effective reach is not likely with web based media channels, including social media sites and (not so possible) viral effects. But it certainly sounds as if the web is by far the biggest and most effective channel out there listening to all the noise it’s created in the advertising industry and among clients hoping for wonders.

The record number of YouTube views is probably Justin Bieber with 3.7 million views a day in September this year, adding up to over a billion views. Did he sell a billion records?

Lady Gaga is another artist with monthly views in the millions per month.

Those may be businesses but are not advertising brands.

Ikea gets a couple of hundred thousand YouTube views at best for their real ads.

While views are in the millions  for spoofs and parodies done outside the control of the company. “Ads” they’d never approve if they had a chance to.

Volvo three years ago had a viral success of sorts with a video called “Volvo S60 TS 5 kills Ferrari”. It’s a shaky home made video, so far getting almost 390, 000 views. Not made by any of Volvo’s agencies.

Normally Volvo gets views counted in the low thousands. Yes, thousands. Not hundred thousands. You don’t produce costly spots for that sort of viewership. Only if it’s something like a crazy road race, illegal driving, vomiting and cursing, will the numbers go up to 6 digits.

Pepsi’s Michael Jackson is up to 15,776,603 views as of Ocober 28, 2.48 PM, New York time. It was put up a year ago, so it obviously has more to do with MJ’s rebirth, than it has to do with Pepsi the brand.

As mentioned in the beginning, the closest to TV numbers online for a brand may be Nike with its “Write the future”. Which when I write this has more than 21,000,000 views.

That’s impressive.

However. Super Bowl 2010 had more than 106,000,000 TV viewers, and the final episode of M.A.S.H. 1983 had over 105,000,000 TV viewers.

Which leads me to events.

Events create more interest than anything else. Whether it’s in sports, movie events like the Oscars, or royal weddings.

It seems as if one of the few ways to reach a huge audience in one go today is to piggyback on a well watched event. Or create one.

The media landscape is so extremely fragmented and complex. With hundreds and hundreds of TV channels, outdoor advertising spaces everywhere from garbage bins to wildpostings on empty walls to taxis to hoardings, banners and posters and what not, including the clothes you wear.  Wherever you look there are ads, ads, ads and more ads. Web banners on a trillion sites, facebook pages, etc. etc. How much can you take in?

Consequently a clever headline, beautifully crafted type, a nice photo, a neat and well balanced lay-out don’t cut it anymore.

Neither does the formulaic 30 second spot. If it ever did?

And talking about new media, web banners on the whole long ago stopped working.

Doing something with a chance to go viral is easier said than done. To complicate things is that what’s going viral on a big scale is all too often something that most brands don’t want to be associated with. Dirty jokes, juvenile pranks, sexual innuendo etc. Or it’s a well viewed TV spot that gets extended life online.

Viral is not a strategy. It’s a lottery.

Although you can buy ads on Youtube obviously. And end up in front of successful clips.

But that isn’t exactly for free either. And personally, I can’t wait until the disruption is over, and with the new function where you can click out of the ad, well, many of us will. Because unlike sitting laidback in the sofa watching TV, we’re quite active and impatient when online.

Even so, advertising is not dead. It’s just become so ubiquitous that we’re basically immune. It’s no longer enough to advertise. It may not even be enough to come up with a brilliant ad.

No matter how big or small the logo is, people today are so ad-literate they can smell an ad even when it tries hard not to look or feel like one. Product placement is often so clumsily done that it may backfire rather than having a positive impact. The cheese factor reaching Himalaya heights.

So what can an advertiser do?

Create an event.

Build something bigger than the ad. Make something to talk about. And weave the advertising around it.

What is an event?

I don’t mean a circus tent or a fair. I mean something that is more than an ad campaign, be it expressed in a print campaign, TV, online, mobile, instore, etc. or all media combined. Nike+ is what I’d like to call an event.

It isn’t just an ad for a runner shoe. It isn’t just a web site with pictures of shoes and tips for runners. It is engagement. An ongoing event. And event the audience can partake in. Not just view. For serious and semi serious runners it’s “Just Do It” on a whole other scale. Which resonates beyond the core target group. It also raises the positive perception of the brand among people who may only buy a pair of shoes to promenade to the car or the subway in.

It engages. Doing, not just talking.

Honda’s diesel engine work “Hate Something, Change Something” was more than a couple of ads and some web stuff. It was not just a clever ad campaign, it came out of some real thinking and engineering. It gained fame in our industry for its sweet TV spot, but it was way more than that.

It’s an ongoing event, taking place not just in the marketing department but in the factories and the R&D department. The agency did a brilliant job of bringing it to the masses.

The big idea was in the product development.

The big advertising idea was in taking the words of the inventor and making it pretty and charming and engaging. Doing, and talking about the doing. In a creative and brilliant way.

Thus it won every conceivable award and was talked about not just among ad folks. It sold diesel engines. It made diesel engines look very different from the perception they had in peoples minds. Especially Honda’s engines. It was not an ad campaign, but an event that changed things.

Ogilvy’s Conquer China for the North Face was an event. Inviting the audience to participate by putting flags like explorers do, all over China. So it become something to follow and talk about. It was not just a stunt. It was an idea that emerged from the core of the brand. It was way more effective than any traditional ad. The ads became more than ads. Check out ogilvyaction and look for the Red Flag Movement.

What is an event? Well, an event is often what evening papers sell copies based on. A major train robbery becomes an event for weeks, maybe for months, even years. It transfixes the man in the street for a period of time and often remains as a life long memory.

The recent drama in Chile, with 33 miners trapped for many weeks, and thankfully saved, was on every news channel in every part of the world. It became a media event, a PR event, and it will be turned into books and movies.

So the first job is not to create an ad. It’s to come up with something to talk about. And then figure out a way to dramatize it in such a convincing and engaging way that it breaks trough the clutter.

Of course, coming up with events that compete with the real world’s drama might not be an easy task. But it sure does have a better chance than a couple of ads where the idea is an ad idea rather than an idea based on something somewhat bigger.

The big idea is no longer a tag line or an ad. It’s “what can make us talked about?” In a good way.

Ads seem a little unimportant in today’s world. That is why creating an event is important than creating an ad. Using every possible creative solution and media channel to tell the story.

We like to say that modern advertising is not a one way monologue but a two way conversation. Personally I don’t think it’s so simple. People don’t want to have a conversation with their brand. But they might want to have a conversation about something. That “something” is rarely an ad. But it can be related to a brand. About a brand.

In other words. Don’t try to come up with an ad. Come up with something that’s bigger than an ad.

By Tore Claesson. He has been an Art Director and Creative Director at agencies around the world over the past 25 years or so. Still alive and kicking.