We're fed up with viral marketing campaigns. Plain sick of 'em, in fact, and ARGs are to blame. Here's
why:
They're predictable. All of this Alternate Reality Gaming crap (ARG for short, say it out loud for an aural clue as to how it makes us feel) has been done before. The ilovebees.com ARG worked for Halo 2 because it was fresh and unique… at the time. But now that we've all seen a few of these, we're jaded. We KNOW that marketers will eventually give us all of the details on their products if they want to sell them, so why should we care to solve silly puzzles in order to learn trivial product details? Seriously: why?
They?re not entertaining. This is viral because it?s got all the elements of a successful clip: attractive girl, tension (she?s being loud and annoying in an office environment), a surprise ending, and slapstick violence. It makes us want to pass it on. This is viral because fat kids dancing are almost always funny (sorry, fat kids, but it?s true). ARGs are neither funny nor entertaining, therefore we will not pass them on. Therefore they are not, by definition, viral, except amongst those communities that specialize in solving ARG puzzles.
They?re superfluous. Nothing we do to solve an ARG is going to change your launch date, the amount of information we inevitably get about your product, or even our cost to acquire the product. Some ARGs are based on the premise that those who solve them will win the product, but really, for the campaign to be successful, marketers need to get millions of people interested in the product through word-of-mouth. If millions are involved, your chances of winning are pretty much the same as any old sweepstakes drawing, and a helluva lot more work.
They?re artificially difficult. It?d be a little more bearable if marketers were to create solvable puzzles, instead, they post only parts of the puzzle and release key pieces of the puzzle week by week. Have you ever tried to solve a puzzle with pieces missing from it? It?s not just maddening. It?s unsolvable. That?s what many of these ARGs are like, and that?s why we don?t bother to pass them on to friends. Friends don?t forward unsolvable puzzles on to friends. No forwarding = not very viral.
They?re delayed gratification. Why should we bother going to a URL that has no immediate gratification, no punch line, no smile juice? As rational animals, we?ve learned not to click on links that provide us with no reward. We will instead click on URLs for items that promise an immediate kick to our pleasure centers.
We?re done with these so-called viral marketing campaigns. We?re sick of them. We?re not going to forward them on anymore. We?ll let some other blog play marketing patsy and forward on uninteresting, boring, predictable, superfluous, artificially difficult ARGs. Make some funny clips with cute girls, fat boys, lip-synching college students, whatever. Just stop with the games, already.
