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P&G's Downy brand has gone all soft and emotional as it embarks on its Feel More campaign. One strange and surprising extension of the communication plan has been the involvement of Gen Art and filmmakers to create films to provoke thinking.

To lift directly from the press release..

"Throughout the years, the Downy brand has evoked certain emotional reactions and connections that, lately, are overcome by the hustle and bustle of everyday life," said Marty Vanderstelt, Brand Manager, Downy, North America. "As consumers are spending more time blogging rather than hugging, we wanted to show people that it's important to embrace their emotions and appreciate life's moments. By partnering with Gen Art and these four filmmakers, the Downy brand is encouraging people to take a moment to slow down and experience every emotion that life creates."

On many levels this could easily be seen as jumping on the bandwagon of brands moving into the arts and non-traditional just for the sake of it, but I think there's something in the fact that the brand is brave enough to stand for something bigger than itself, to shift itself into the unfamiliar world of the arts and to trust brand expression to filmmakers and artists.


Posted by Ed Cotton Duncan Watts, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, was recently interviewed on the topic of viral marketing for HBR’s Ideacast series.

Watts started out by explaining how viruses work, highlighting how it’s well known to science that a small number of people start epidemics. For a virus to become an epidemic, it requires each infected person infects at least one other person. Infect less than one and a viral epidemic doesn’t occur.

In science terms, an epidemic requires a “reproduction rate” of 1.

Watts believes marketers need think beyond viral, to an alternative that he calls Big Seed Marketing. This demands marketers go beyond the analogy of viral, where current thinking demands that viruses start with a small number of people. His recommendation is not to replace traditional marketing with viral, but introduce viral elements to traditional programs.

Simply put, pay for an initial base and then add tools to help spread the idea.

Watts used Procter and Gamble’s launch of Tide Cold Water, as an example of Big Seed Marketing in action. P&G wanted a true viral effect, but in tests campaigns generated “reproduction rates” that were significantly less than 1.

Procter then sent the campaign to its mailing list of 900,000 people and discovered that it took 20 people to infect 1. Although the impact wasn’t as viral as they had hoped for, they still added 40,000 people for no cost. Importantly, they didn’t start out small hoping to seed the idea; they started with almost 1 million people.

For years we’ve been using the “viral” in viral marketing, thinking and hoping that it’s marketing that works like a virus, it turns out we were wrong on two fronts; there’s no such thing as a truly viral marketing campaign and if you want to get the next best thing, forget small, you need to start out big.