Upshot’s latest Potty Posting is now up. A PDF version is available here for easy sharing and printing, or feel free to read a text-only version below (complete with linked content).
Stay tuned this week for some more details on the topic, as well as a whole slew of great examples. But without further ado, onto the posting!
DUDE! Viral Marketing to Dudes Is Easy
How to spread faster than Swine Flu
Let’s say that your client has struggled for years to crack the code of the highly desirable young male demographic. Recently, the client read somewhere that these dudes are especially receptive to “viral marketing.” Boy, did the brand trip all over itself to fling its first “viral campaign” out the door: a “hilarious” site that was doused in branding, loaded with “Which Entourage Character Are You?” quizzes, and a tweeting mascot. The only problem: their “viral campaign” got trumped by the latest Farting Preacher clip on Youtube, so now the client’s vowing to never advertise online again.
DUUUUUUDE, we’re all making this way too difficult. Men are NOT from Mars; they’re just “dudes.” We’ve been marketing to dudes for years, and we know how to do this! It’s possible that we just got a bit distracted by marketers hyping up their supposedly “viral” campaigns, which ended up completely missing the mark. But let’s step back and think about how dudes normally interact, what they’re already passing along to their friends, and how a brand can wedge itself in amongst that content.
DUDE DICTUM #1: Dudes like to publicly humiliate, embarrass, and prank other dudes.
They’re the first to call a dude and mock him when his team loses. They tell embarrassing stories to a dude’s significant other. They prank each other with fake lawsuits (just ask Cronin or Crokin). They haze the dude, they draw on him with Sharpies, they laugh at him, and they do it all because they’re the dude’s “friends.” Sounds sadistic? Sounds nonsensical? Sounds like you’re not watching Pardon the Interruption or listening to Howard Stern or reading the Sports Guy on ESPN.com, or even watching Punk’d. Dumb or not (okay, it is pretty dumb), it’s just the way dudes tend to interact, so you might as well roll with it. If your campaign has an element where dudes can humiliate a friend, there’s a very good chance they’ll jump at that opportunity. And when they’ve sent that friend the humiliating photo/video/message, congrats, you’re a viral marketer! Anything that involves a user-submission is ripe for this. For instance, let’s say you’re doing research for a Potty Posting and you stumble across a site that lets you upload photos onto the heads of Chippendale’s dancers. Then, you remember that your coworkers have tons of embarrassing holiday party photos on the public drive. You could safely assume that some “dude” would be posting that video within seconds on some public forum (such as, I don’t know, right here on The Awesome Blog?), making this an ideal example of how dudes happily share branded content at the expense of other dudes. (All of this is done in the name of education and edification, of course.)
Bonus tip: Those “Was that real?” videos have a built-in element of friend pranking, since dudes can see which of their friends will fall for them (and maybe test the water if they’re not sure if the vids are real). Whether they’re real or fake doesn’t really matter, as long as the content stimulates conversation and/or debates. The clips that must be fake generate their own discussions about “how did they do that?” especially among dudes who fancy themselves to be amateur mythbusters (along with all those dudes who debate for the sake of debating).
DUDE DICTUM #2: Dudes like to compete, and beat, their friends.
There’s a reason that everything from pickup games to poker games come with a healthy serving of trash-talking: dudes that aren’t embarrassing their friends outright can always humiliate each other by dominating them in competition. Why not stimulate some battles between friends at sites like ibeatyou.com, a social network where people can challenge each other to various competitions? Challenges are inherently “viral,” since challenging someone requires that something be passed along, and it might as well have your brand on it. Again, it doesn’t hurt to make this triumph public: ibeatyou.com has even integrated with Facebook Connect so that all challenges (and victories) can be publicized in each user’s news stream.
DUDE DICTUM #3: Dudes like “dude stuff!”
This point is so obvious that it barely needs its own dictum, except for the fact that we’re so quick to forget it. Without dude humor (and making dudes laugh will NEVER get old), dude-oriented content, and stuff that dudes like, no dude’s going to give your supposedly “viral” content the time of day. We all know the timeless qualities that appeal to dudes: sex, controversy, gross out humor, and stuff smashing into other stuff. Unfortunately, we’re so used to seeing these elements used in such dumbed-down ways (beer ads, we’re looking at you) that we’ve forgotten how to integrate them into great executions. The two extremes aren’t mutually exclusive: tie these longstanding proclivities in with quick wit, unexpected twists, or in-on-the-joke humor and you’ll see results. (Of course we’ve got plenty of examples of this on TheAwesomeBlog.net.) At the end of the day, you know these dudes. They’re your brothers, cousins, friends, coworkers, and probably your dads, too. Do a bit of “dude diligence” before your campaign heads out the door, and ask them if they’d be willing to pass this on to their friends. If not, we’ll expect your campaign to go more monkeypox than “viral.”
the hotspot for haute thought is the pot at upshot
