“How we see it”
- Published on 29/08/2011
- in Category Brands & Marketing / News
As a companion piece to “We’re all Marketers Now”, McKinsey interviews marketing leaders from AMEX, Virgin and Yahoo on marketing in the age of engagement.
Virgin’s Ridgeway and Hayes from AMEX don’t offer much new here. But Duncan Watts, research scientist at Yahoo, is worth a read. Watts argues for a more scientific approach to marketing in the face of and enabled by the deluge of data in the modern organisation. He challenges intuition driven marketing with some surprising insights; including emerging learning that adoption in social networks generally happens within one degree of the seed – not in the viral manner imagined. In his example, the famous “penguin” video – one of the first “viral” events – really only spread once it made front page of Yahoo! And was seen by 100million people.
Interestingly both Watts and Ridgeway talk about the importance of mass media in this new “fragmented” age. For Ridgeway it’s critical for the creation of iconic activity. For Watts, it’s the real driver of a lot of apparently “viral” successes. In the case of the penguin video, the Yahoo exposure was the digital equivalent of mass media.
