The Tipping Point Debunked!
January 28, 2008
You know what they say about things that sound too good to be true? Fast Company has an article titled, “Is the Tipping Point Toast” where they point to data from Duncan Watts that suggests that Malcolm Gladwell might have been wrong. Duncan built sophisticated computer models and simulations to help understand how trends start. His results are 180 degrees from what Malcolm had original suggested in his best selling ‘The Tipping Point’.
Malcolm’s point was there were “rare, all-powerful folks” that if you could reach them you could “reach everyone else through them, basically for free.” Call the ‘Influentials’ theory for the last fifty years, it dictates more than a billion marketing dollars. Watts’ suggest that this money is being wasted. His models suggest that the opposite is true and he has developed ‘new technique for propagating ads virally, which can double or even quadruple the reach of an ordinary online campaign by harnessing the pass-around power of everyday people–and ignoring Influentials altogether.’
So if the ‘Tipping Point’ B.S. what is a marketing person to do? Clive Thompson from Fast Company explains:
Watts believes there is. 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). Watts developed the concept with a friend, Jonah Peretti, a veteran of the viral wars. While a student at MIT in 2001, Peretti had an email exchange with
Nike that turned into an accidental pass-around hit, reaching 50 million people and catapulting him onto the Today show. A year or so later, a satirical Web site Peretti created in one weekend–blackpeopleloveus.com–amassed 30 million page views in a few weeks. Soon, companies were frantically trying to hire him to help their online ad campaigns “go viral.” Peretti partly disagrees with Watts about the randomness of trends; he thinks it’s possible to intentionally make a funny Web site into a pass-around hit online. But as Peretti discovered, real-world goods are harder. When he tried to pitch “some company’s shitty product,” he couldn’t force it to go viral.In their hunt for a practical way to create maximum exposure for any given ad, Watts and Peretti developed a way to marry the benefits of old-school mass marketing with clever six-degrees effects. Their first test case came when the Brady Campaign, the gun-control group, asked for help with an online petition.
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. Typically, people ignore this “share with your friends” pitch. But Watts and Peretti included technology called ForwardTrack, which displays the route the ad travels once you’ve forwarded it. This turned ad forwarding into a piece of social cartography. People would pass the ad specifically to those friends most likely to keep it moving. It became a Facebook-like contest to sign up the most friends.
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.
Neither was, technically, a viral hit. Neither passed the disease threshold, where the meme spreads exponentially and engulfs the mainstream. “But you can double your impact, which is still pretty good,” Watts says.
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. And that is precisely what the wizards of Madison Avenue, presiding over our zillion-channel microniche market, have rejected as obsolete. “But that’s the thing about magic,” says Watts. “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
