Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
173
 www.ideavirus.com
company you’ve never heard of, which solves a problem you probably don’t have? Not
bloody likely.
Surely there’s a better way for this company to spend fifty million dollars. Surely there’s a
more effective way to start a relationship with the 10,000 people who matter to them than
interrupting millions of us over and over and over….
Old-fashioned, hand-crafted, fun-to-make, sorta-fun-to-watch interruption advertising isn’t
going to disappear altogether. But it’s just a matter of time before CEOs and investors start
measuring their ever-increasing ad budgets with the same critical eye they use for every other
insanely expensive investment they make.

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Unleashing the Ideavirus
174
 www.ideavirus.com
Permission: The Missing Ingredient
When Hotmail launched their free email service, they did almost everything right. They
built a product that was worthy of an ideavirus. They made is smooth. They built
amplification right into the product. They approached the right people and started with just
enough push to make the thing take off.
But then they made a huge error.
They forgot to get permission to follow up. They failed to ask their users (the folks who were
infected by the virus) if it was okay to send them an anticipated, personal and relevant email
every week. They didn’t build an asset.
As a result, the Hotmail website has one and only one way to make money. By selling banner
ads. And nobody clicks on banner ads when they’re reading their email. So advertising on the
Hotmail site is super cheap. And probably overpriced.
We’re talking a multi-billion-dollar mistake here. If they had permission to follow up with
20 million people every single week with an email that was filled with useful information and
relevant ads, they could easily sell the slots in this email for a buck a week. That’s a billion
dollars a year in lost revenue, which, using stock market multiples, is a gazillion dollars in
market cap. All because they forgot to ask for permission.
Let’s face it: It’s unlikely that every single idea you come up with is virusworthy. If we’re
going to have to grow our businesses in a reliable, predictable way, it’s unwieldy to have to
depend on an ideavirus catching on every time we want to grow. We still need a way to
communicate with people directly, to do it when 
we
want to, to talk to the marketplace
without a filter.
Advertising used to be the way to do this. But what a waste! What a waste to have to pay a
magazine for an ad to reach a user you already have! You’ve got a pair of Nike sneakers in
your closet. But Nike has to buy an ad to reach you—they don’t have permission or the
ability to talk to you directly.

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