IT MIGHT seem like a modern concept thought up by cynical advertising execs out to squeeze every last penny from the unsuspecting consumer, but the latest buzz on the advertising scene was actually the brainchild of our Victorian ancestors.
Today we may be subject to Word of Mouth (Wom) marketing – from friends who have been given a new product to try out direct from the manufacturer, or by seeing a company's latest advert ping into our e-mail inbox because someone we know thought we mi
ght find it funny.
Forward-thinking businesses in the 19th century were playing the same game, a fact that Gerry Farrell, pictured below, creative director of the Leith Agency, is quick to point out.
"The Victorians used to pay people to walk around the streets saying 'I'm using Dr Fortis's foot balm!'" he says.
"It's exactly the same thing. It's not a new concept. It has just developed in recent years.
"Companies have realised that if they do something which creates interest, they get media for free, whether it's people sending e-mails around or just talking about it. Now, something sensational will create its own marketing campaign on the internet. I can't understand why there is so much dull advertising around. If anyone is talking about your stuff, you have used your money well."
In the US, an organised, but traditional, approach to Wom marketing is a driving force. Boston-based Wom agency BzzAgent is to launch its 24th UK campaign next week – for sanitary product brand Lil-lets. More than 5,000 women – some of them in Scotland – will sign up to be sent the product and asked to chat to their friends about it, whether the feedback is good or bad.
At the end of the ten-week trial, the women are asked to fill out a report, consisting of both their opinion of the product and also detailing the reactions of those they have told about it to feed back to the company.
Joe Chernov, spokesman for BzzAgent, is adamant that "agents" who sign up to one of the company's campaigns are not under any pressure to give positive feedback.
He says: "People have tired of normal advertising. We see too many adverts and we're choking with information – Wom allows the consumer to be in control.
"The agents are not paid – the Victorians' method would now breach Wom ethics. If someone told you they'd been paid £5 to tell you about a product, you wouldn't want to know. Because they have just been sent a sample and can give their honest opinion, it works."
On both sides of the Atlantic, viral marketing – where consumers send on e-mails with links to videos, photos or text to friends – is like an electronic version of face-to-face word of mouth advertising and is increasingly becoming the key to a successful advertising campaign.
Farrell explains: "There are so many different types of media now for companies to get their message across – and most of them are word of mouth. If Stephen Fry says on Twitter that he loves your product, that's great, because however many thousand followers he has hear that too."
One of the most recent – and most successful – campaigns has been the latest T-Mobile advert. Filmed in Liverpool Street station in London, train travellers were not warned the advert was to be filmed and were taken by surprise when music started blaring from the speakers and hundreds of people dressed as ordinary commuters suddenly started performing an impressive dance routine.
Stunned members of the public started filming the bizarre scene on their phones and within minutes, the footage was being beamed around the world.
Only weeks later, when the advert was finally screened on national TV, did people realise it was a plug for the mobile phone company. But by then, the image was so strongly fixed in people's minds that Wom marketing had done its job.
Farrell says: "That was a very clever piece of marketing. People didn't know what it was, they filmed it and everyone was talking about it before it even hit the screens."
Farrell himself used online viral marketing to launch Irn Bru's famous Christmas advert two years ago, which parodied the Snowman cartoon.
He remembers: "I gave it to my son, he sent it around some friends and within three weeks it was on one million Bebo pages.
"You have to persuade the client that that will work. I had to twist their arms to let me launch it online before we put it on the TV. If we're certain people are going to enjoy it, it's the best thing to do.
"You're not going to get people to blog about the new can of Irn Bru, but you will get them talking about the new advert."
But some companies are not as keen on Wom activity as its effect is very hard to measure.
Farrell says: "You can't really measure the negative publicity against the positive. That's what makes it so difficult."
He remembers hearing about a US four-wheeled drive brand which offered software on its website for people to create their own versions of its adverts only to find the technology over-run by environmental protestors parodying the original advert for their own anti-gas guzzling promotion – and sending it around via e-mail.
"That was a disaster for them – a total disaster," he says. "It was a risk and it didn't pay off."
Perhaps not all publicity, even word of mouth marketing, is good publicity, after all.
