An Epidemic of AdvertisingBy Bruce Barry
So I’m watching the Super Bowl like everyone else back there a few weeks ago, keeping one brain hemisphere on the game, and the other on the perverse annual entertainment form we know and love as the parade of new commercials aired at stratospheric expense during the Super Bowl. The intrigue in this year’s ad watch was heightened by the promise of a high number of dot com ads – commercial time during the big game purchased at big prices by new and unknown Internet startups. Looking for splashy impact, these firms rolled the dice by spending down their marketing budgets (or perhaps the bulk of their entire capitalization!) to buy one quick marketing cyberthrust at Super Bowl ad rates.
It was during this televised parade of Madison Avenue pornography that I first heard about what could be the Internet’s most disturbing e-commerce development: a company called epidemic.com. The specific content of the ad that aired on Super Bowl Sunday lies beyond my recollection, but something about it caught my eye and induced me to hop on the Web soon after and check out this company's site. Now if the story ended here, it would just go down as a happy click in time – I did what all dot coms wanted us to do that fateful Sunday evening: I remembered the name long enough to visit the site. (I imagine their goal fell short of inducing me to write a column that calls their trade "disturbing," although they may take publicity wherever they can get it.)
The name epidemic.com might have you guessing it’s a medical site of some sort – health information or the like. You’d be wrong. This outfit is about marketing, not medicine. The epidemic of its name is a play on what has come to be known in e-business as "viral marketing." Coined a few years ago by a venture capital firm, viral marketing refers to the spread and adoption of Internet business activity through an electronic version of word-of-mouth. The typical viral marketing technique induces Internet users to pass along some sort of advertisement or marketing message to others, usually via e-mail. Enough people do this, and the result is exponential growth in the presence and visibility of an advertising message.
The classic case is the e-mail provider "hotmail.com." Anyone who has been using e-mail for a while has likely received a message from someone who uses Microsoft’s hotmail as his or her e-mail provider. E-mail messages from hotmail users always carry at the bottom an automatically inserted one-line ad in the form of a hyperlink inviting you to use hotmail as your own e-mail service provider. A pioneer of viral marketing, hotmail grew in under two years to become the world’s largest e-mail provider with over 12 million subscribers, and in three years to more than 40 million subscribers. The key to viral marketing is its word-of-mouth strategy; hotmail spent a pittance – under half a million dollars – on marketing and promotion on its way to becoming the biggest e-mail provider on the planet.
All of which brings us to epidemic.com – a new viral marketing concept that promises, if its founders have their way, to invade your digital experience with more advertising than ever before. In a nutshell, epidemic.com wants to turn all of us into advertisers by incorporating graphic advertisements in the e-mail messages we send to our friends, relatives, coworkers, whomever. As the firm’s online description puts it, epidemic.com wants to "reinvent e-mail as an advertising medium and distribution channel for e-commerce."
Here’s how it works. You sign up as what they call an "e-Carrier" (lovely imagery there), which allows you to start including clickable advertising banners within the e-mail messages you send others. If the recipient of your message chooses to click on the ad, follows the link through to the advertiser, and makes a purchase, you get a small commission on that purchase. When you send a message, you get to select the ads to be included, so you can include just the right banner ad that you think will appeal to Aunt Harriet – everyone’s an e-commerce marketer now!
All right, it’s a little creepy, but what’s the big deal? None, really, if you’re comfortable with an infestation of consumer culture and advertising into every last corner of your life. The fine folks at epidemic.com presumably see this as the wave of the future. Their Web site breathlessly pitches the scheme as "cool and fun." You can "choose and send cool ads that people will notice" and "be the first to tell your friends about the latest brands and coolest trends." (You get the feeling this was written by middle-aged accountants practicing their teen-speak?)
In this brave new world, personal correspondence that fails to capitalize on marketing potential is a digital commerce profit opportunity foregone. Epidemic.com wants you to "target your epiAds to the people you feel will have the most use for the featured product or service." So don’t spent too much time composing that e-mailed letter to Mom; there’s work to be done on your target marketing strategy to make sure just the right ads are in there to optimize the probability you’ll snag a kickback off Mom’s purchasing power.
The dictionary defines an epidemic as an outbreak of a contagious disease that spreads rapidly and widely. The cure for this one is simple restraint. But on the off chance your system is poisoned by an epidemic.com e-mail, my suggestion is to induce vomiting.
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