Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
180
 www.ideavirus.com
In addition to having a hard time describing why the service might be virusworthy, it’s not
smooth, either. In order to even find out if you 
like
the service, you have to buy a PC camera
($100, plus the hassle of setting it up) as well as download and install a piece of software on
your PC to run the thing.
Once it is set up, it’s not clear if it’s persistent. The incremental benefit of each use of the
service doesn’t appear to go up—you don’t get better and better rewards the more you use it.
So, as the novelty wears off, the likelihood you’ll keep using it and keep sneezing about it is
small indeed.
Finally, they forgot to focus on just one hive. The ads are running in a wide variety of
magazines, targeting a wide variety of users. Because there’s no overwhelming concentration
in just one hive, the odds of the virus popping are small indeed.
So, wise guy, what would you do instead? Well, I’d re-orient the launch from a general mass-
market consumer to a very vertical business-to-business offering. For example, imagine
putting it on the factory floor. Now, instead of a technician having to drop everything and
type in a URL to see a certain page in a manual, he could just hold up the shop manual to
the camera on his already configured PC. Once you can show that it makes an overwhelming
difference in just a few shops, the word can quickly spread across the hive.
If I really wanted to find the consumer market, I’d focus only on the techiest markets (like
the readers of 
Wired
, but I’d create a benefit to promiscuous sneezers within that market.
Rather than creating a flat environment (each ad goes straight to the user), I’d introduce an
email component that rewards the few people who came in at the beginning for emailing
their techno-friendly friends.
My guess is that if Digimarc values the advertising at retail, they’re probably going to spend
$300 for every regular user they get. In order for it to be profitable, my guess is that they
need to get that number down to $3. Problem.

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