Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
182
 www.ideavirus.com
As you pass more cows and different cows and provocative cows, your litany of cow lore
increases. Your ability to talk in interesting ways about the cows increases. “Hey, if you think
this cow is cute, wait until you hear about the cow I saw downtown….”
All of which goes to say that street art, performance art, guerrilla marketing performances…
any sort of interruption of our regular routine can lead to a moment of conversation. When
Abby Hoffman and the Yippies dropped dollar bills in the middle of Wall Street during
lunch hour, they generated a virus among the people who were there, which spread to the
media and beyond. By getting people to interact in a way that they weren’t accustomed to,
the Yippies created more impact than they would have if they’d spent five times as much
cash running an ad.
While this sort of interruption of routine is highly amplified, it is by nature not very
persistent. If you keep interrupting the routine, the routine stops being routine and the
interruptions are. If they kept the cows there for years at a time, they’d be boring. If Abby
Hoffman dropped dollar bills every day, people would quickly stop being excited by it.
That’s why the bar for interruption and guerrilla marketers keeps moving. You can’t do what
created buzz yesterday, because there’s no way that’s going to create more buzz today.

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Unleashing the Ideavirus
183
 www.ideavirus.com
Never Drink Alone
Alcohol manufacturers have two spectacular advantages over most marketers. First, there’s a
huge profit margin built in. Second, drinking is a social phenomenon, perfect for spawning
ideaviruses.
Yet, given this natural platform, most distillers are lazy and just buy a huge number of
interruption marketing events—billboards, magazine ads, liquor store displays. They work
sometimes—remember, all vodka is the same, yet people gladly pay double for Absolut.
Most telling of all is the fact that St. Pauli Girl and Becks Light are made on precisely the
same brewery line in Hamburg, yet people will insist that they prefer one over the other.
Despite their successes, though, virtually all of the money spent on liquor advertising is
wasted. Last year, alcohol marketers spent more than a billion dollars advertising their wares,
but you probably can’t even name the top 20 advertisers off the top of your head.
It’s far, far more effective for alcohol manufacturers to focus on advertising to your friends,
not to you, to invest in building viruses that make it more likely that the group will discuss a
brand and eventually order it… or at the very least, admire the person who does.
One of my favorite examples was reportedly created by the brilliant marketer Bob Dorf.
When Dorf was a PR guy, I’m told he was hired by Galliano to turn their obscure liquer into
a nationwide phenomenon. Realizing that there wasn’t enough money in the world to buy
enough “Drink Galliano” billboards, he took a very different tack. He riffed on an invention
by a California bartender named Harvey and decided to popularize the Harvey Wallbanger.

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