I’d get locked up if I shared images from this visit, so Google it yourself… just not on your work laptop.
While there, we learned how MONA’s founder made $200m playing blackjack. As always, I believe this can teach us a lot about modern marketing.
Welcome to the Walsh School of Modern Advertising.
David Walsh dropped out of school and learnt to gamble like a professional. He’s one of the few gamblers who got rich and chose to build a legacy that’ll outlive him, unlike the third of lottery winners who go bankrupt.
His success got me thinking about the highs and lows of viral marketing, which can be easily likened to a casino visit. Gamblers love to brag about their wins but never mention that the house always wins. The same goes for brands. The evidence is all around us: Salt Bae’s once-viral steak restaurant now loses £5.5m a year; Prime energy drink sales are down 71%; Labubu’s market cap has fallen 22%.
Virality is that freak marriage between brand and culture. A sudden, unexplainable surge of earned reach that sends sales soaring.
The outcome is clear; the mechanism isn’t.
Any Byron Sharp worshippers or trained marketers know that reach is king. Meeting and recruiting new customers (see “penetration”, also not on your work PC) is ‘How Brands Grow.’ I’ve found it in my own research at System1 with the Effie global database: Even brilliantly emotional campaigns create little profit without broad reach.
Les Binet confirmed this again with new research launched at last week at the IPA effectiveness conference. ROI efficiency has little correlation with a campaign’s actual ability to create profit, despite what marketers may think. It’s the campaign that determines its profitability.
So if reach drives growth, and virality sometimes gets us there, why does it so often fizzle out?
Well, because most marketers go to the casino untrained. Walsh, and the brands that behave like him, can teach us two modern marketing lessons.
I sometimes worry my columns will be read back in court one day. “You told marketers to learn to count cards?” the judge will ask.
But I mean it.
If you want to play the viral game, you need to stack the odds in your favor with strategy, resource, and a proper team. Not a random intern and a ring light. Unlike myself, who exclusively visits the casino once a year at Christmas with my five brothers after a few Guinness (cute family tradition).
I could anecdotally list the usual LinkedIn fan favorites who demonstrate the principle of virality actually coming from hard graft, like Duolingo and Curry’s, who have clearly shown they can get viral reach consistently.
Rizz this, rizz that. Honestly, I had no idea what was going on between the various memes. It turns out it was a carefully constructed new social strategy and team from the agency Uncovered, and apparently, one that consistently delivers increased reach and social metrics.
I hate social metrics, so I asked the team to share YouGov brand tracking data proving this was actually consistently moving the dial for KFC.
The results are impressive. It clearly is moving the dial.
They’ve learnt to count cards in the casino of fame.
So if you’re going to gamble, be like Walsh and KFC. Build a skilled team, craft a strategy, and stack the odds in your favor. Then it’s not really gambling at all. It’s mastery.
What’s even smarter than Walsh’s winnings is that he no longer gambles them. He spends most of his fortune ensuring MONA will outlive him. That’s the mindset marketers need as well, using short-term wins to build long-term brands.
Even if you hit viral gold once, it won’t last forever. Platforms shift, tastes change, and before long, you’ll be sitting next to Prime in the bargain bin. (Please don’t try to sue me again Prime.)
Instead, this must be a gateway into guaranteed, repeatable results. Where you spend a pound and get more than a pound out.
Little Moons have successfully demonstrated this skill. They went seriously viral in lockdown, had no idea why, but they knew it would end. They made the most of it by using the boom to get their mochi fridges into national retail. And when the inevitable happened, they started to spend big on paid media. They used viral then paid reach to build a brand that is 35% less sensitive to price.
Or maybe it’s not about ever getting out fully. Maybe you’ve built an in-house team full of writers as good as Netflix dramas like Liquid Death has done. Who consistently create organic content, and if they see the right “viral signals” (send to comment ratio on social), they pump paid media behind to get into the reach it deserves on connected TV.
Or maybe just don’t gamble at all
There’s a lot in modern marketing that does feel like gambling.
Whether it’s hoping to go viral by creating vast amounts of organic content. Or as I shared last week, working with creators who can build brands but struggle to create repeatable results due to the wild swings in creative quality.
But Les Binet’s new research reminds us you don’t have to go all in. Even John Lewis (the patron saint of ‘earned virality’) owes most of its reach to paid media. More than Baby Shark, du du du.
I tap dance between theory and practice all day long, though. In the modern world, the marketing plan has flipped. Brands used to start on TV; now we must earn our place to justify it. Small brands must go to the casino.
So they must learn, build and execute strategies to increase their odds. Then get ready to stop when the winning is good, to invest so they don’t end up in a gutter somewhere on Christmas Eve.
