Richard Pentin

Group Planning Director at TMW and member of IAB Social Media Council, 15 years integrated experience within interactive marketing industry spanning online and offline media, stratetic planning, comms planning, social media strategy, insight generation, CRM, research, measurement.

Seven top tips for improving viral campaign success

There’s clearly no secret formula for viral success otherwise we’d all be doing it.

In fact, there’s nothing worse than a client briefing an agency to devise a viral campaign as it completely misses the point about how good ideas are generated.

A viral campaign is a desired outcome, not the basis for developing break-through campaigns or memes. That said, there are definite skills, techniques and approaches which we can deploy to improve our chances of viral success.

In fact, Propagation Planning is a relatively new school of thought which is dedicated to this very concept. In theory, the more we understand how communities behave and share ideas, the better we’ll get at creating compelling advertising campaigns which self-propagate.

As Griffin Farley, Strategy Director from BBH succinctly puts it “Plan not for the people you reach, but for the people they reach”.