Forget Viral: Start a Wildfire.

We’re all big fans of Malcolm Gladwell over here. And so when I saw this article in Fast Company titled “Is the Tipping Point Toast?” I dug right in. If nothing else, I love a good academic smackdown. The article interviews a former prof who now works for Yahoo, and who refutes the “viral” theory behind a shadowy class we marketing folks call “Influentials.” Along the way, he also coins my nominee for the marketing buzzword of the year: Wildfire marketing.

But let’s start with the theory and move toward the buzzword. First, Influentials: 

“In modern marketing, this idea–that a tiny cadre of connected people triggers trends–is enormously seductive. It is the very premise of viral and word-of-mouth campaigns: Reach those rare, all-powerful folks, and you’ll reach everyone else through them, basically for free.” 

So this former academic, Duncan Watts, basically says that’s garbage. He’s run some computer simulations based on influence, and basically, there’s no real evidence to back up the assertion that some people count for more than others. (A gross over-simplification on my part, but you should really read the article, ‘k?)

Which explains why whenever the creative team gets worked up by an interesting online doo-dad forwarded to us, Dave always points out that he’d sent it around a month ago, and none of us bothered to read it.

And here’s why:

“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”

Dave’s an influential, any way you slice it. He knows everyone. He’s active in the Portland online, design and art scene, he’s forward thinking, and he’s the most social person I know.

But if our little creative society isn’t ready to embrace what he’s forwarding, it flops. Or at least gets relegated to the “read later” folder. And think about how often that happens: At some conference we attended last year, the CD of a very successful online marketing group said 9 out of 10 “viral” marketing sites bomb. Which leads us to the notion that Watts has:

Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That’s because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. “And nobody,” Watts says wryly, “will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire.”  

 To be honest, if “wildfire” isn’t a marketing buzzword by next year, I’ll eat my hat. Watts actually calls it “Big Seed,” but that’s because he’s a scientist and not a copywriter. But read on…

In the past three years, he has worked on a new form of advertising he calls Big Seed marketing (this is part of his work at Yahoo, where he is a principal research scientist). [snip] Watts and Peretti set up a regular mass-market ad buy, running banner ads on several prominent blogs and news sites. Like many ads these days, they added a button on the ad that allows people to forward the ad to a friend–a way of collecting eyeballs for free. 

The technique marries Watts’s two main epiphanies: Cascades require word-of-mouth effects, so you need to build a six-degrees effect into an ad campaign; but since you can never know which person is going to spark the fire, you should aim the ad at as broad a market as possible–and not waste money chasing “important” people. And it worked. The pass-around effect doubled the number of people who saw the Brady Campaign’s ad. They paid for 22,582 hits and received an additional 31,590 for free. Another campaign they ran for the Oxygen network quadrupled the audience size, adding 23,544 hits to the initial 7,064.

The ultimate irony of Watts’s research is that, if you really buy it, the most effective way to pitch your idea is … mass marketing.

Wildfire has all the perfect earmarks for being a great buzzword: Smokin’ creative is still necessary. Increased accountability. Bigger ad spends. Contrarian rationale. Mass market tactics. And let’s face it, lower hopes (double the success) than viral (exponential success).

As for the creative side, I think the best we can do is make the product/service somehow relevant to the lives of our customers. No matter how much glitz and credibility we put behind our sales pitch, no matter how “cool” we make it for the Influentials, if the creative isn’t relevant, we’re just sparking wet tinder.