What Makes an Ad Campaign a Success? Viral, of Course

Science Daily has written an interesting article about ad campaigns online. In particular they are looking at what makes some online campaigns successful and why do others fail.


The answer seems to be quite simple really, and restaurants in particular have known the answer for a long time…..Word of mouth! A small business lives and dies on word of mouth, friends passing on good impressions to their social network and them passing on to their friends etc. That old adage, “get good service you’ll tell one person, get bad service, you’ll tell ten” is true, and now with the successful integration of online social networking such as Facebook and Twitter into society, it’s all too easy to pass on a good experience.


Science Daily believes it is this motivation that creates a great online campaign, the motivation to share it with other people as something they will enjoy. These are the findings of a study held by the Simon Fraser University. Their paper, Viral Marketing: Motivations to Forward Online Content, has been published online in the Journal of Business Research.





The study was designed to find out why people would take an interest in certain things and more importantly, what motivated them to forward it on through an e-mail of social network. They surveyed 582 heavy internet users in order to find out and it seems their findings where something that we have known all along.  No one likes a boring campaign!


Aside from this, a prime motivator is the urge to be the first. Their findings showed that people wanted to be the first to know something and the first to pass it on to their friends so as to appear “knowledgeable” and “hip”. What we forward on basically helps people to build up a character image of us, hence the reason we at Movieviral bring you all the good stuff, because we want to be hip! Read the article here to read the “science bit”.


So, do you agree with their findings? Seems like a no brainer to me! Your tax dollars hard at work proving the obvious. Comments below, or join the discussion at our forums.