> COVER STORY ‘


If I just threw an ad up on Facebook with the idea that its art would But if I did something non-obtrusive, clever and authentic because I


Rayport, who was in Dublin to speak at the 20th anniversary of Fleishman-Hillard in Ireland (he is on the advisory board of Fleishman-Hillard), laughs at the coincidence. “He [Draper] was very upset about that. He sent me an email saying he couldn’t understand why I couldn’t call the people from Wikipedia to tell them to stop crediting me with the invention of viral marketing because he invented it. “What surprised me was here was this guy who invested in all


these successful digital media companies and he believed you could just call upWikipedia and tell them not to publish something. That’s not how this medium works. “All I know is that article was the hardest thing I ever tried to get published, it took me over a year to get it published. In the mid- Nineties anything that had ‘viral’ in it sounded like HIV and nobody wanted to have anything to do with a viral contagion.” Rayport, a genial gentleman who takes a polite interest in near-


ly everything, is speaking to me in the seats of the new Aviva Stadium. We have the entire place to ourselves for our interview. Regardless of whether he invented viral marketing or not, the


week I meet Rayport is the very week that a storm of controversy emerged on Facebook after a woman pushed a cat into a bin in the UK. Rayport isn’t surprised at how that went viral. “We live in this world where anything you do today is viral. A journalist writes a story to be shared. Viral is the discipline of our times.” Rayport’s first job was as a journalist for Fortune magazine. “I


found it incredibly inspiring to be part of Time Life, but I also had a deep abiding interest in computers and programming and I was looking at magazines on shop shelves and decided that sooner or later we’d be sending that magazine over a wire.”


New technologies In the mid-Nineties, he saw a major shift emerging – how the world of media and content would intersect with the world of technology and networks. “This was fascinating because what we were work- ing on at Harvard Business School was e-commerce before there was a web. For decades economists had said we’d seen huge productivity gains from application of technology to agriculture, to manufacturing and assembly. But the conventional wisdom in the economics community was that we would never see that level of magnitude of productivity gains in the services sector for the sim-


ple reason of human factor dependency – such as the person who welcomes you in a restaurant or hotel.” This, he says, all began to change with the introduction of tech- nologies like interactive voice response (IVR) and its uptake by credit card issuers and home shopping networks. “Suddenly you had people running call centre businesses, generating extremely attractive profit margins because they were building their business out of information flows and the less they touched in the physical world the better.” Rayport also realised that the dynamics of business were due an overhaul. “Part of it was teaching at Harvard Business School. We had these traditional marketing courses, teaching 45 case studies in a row and every single one of them was about an auto maker, a branded package product, and all these standard categories from our industrial manufacturing past. “But even in the 1990s, 85pc of GDP output in the US was from


the services sector. The question was not only what happens when content media meets technology networks, but what hap- pens when services meet technology networks and especially what happens when technology is actually smart enough that it can not only serve a customer effectively, but elicit emotional responses from customers? “That for me is the big headline for where we’re going. You could


talk about media and content all day long – it’s my first love – but the bigger story in our economy is the redesign of what most of us do for a living, which is essentially services for other people.” Rayport says Ireland is a great example. We have lots of hi-tech


firms and what many people do in these firms is either write code that automates financial services over the web or mobile devices or they sit in call centres supported by technology to deal with information, a lot of that by IVR. “Five or 10 years ago nobody ever thought you could fall in love


with an inanimate object but the Sony AIBO dog taught us differ- ent,” he continues. “Now you talk about devices like iPad and iPhone that people can’t live without and they fall in love with, because they are part of how they express themselves and con- nect with the people they care about.We’re seeing what they used to call in MIT Media Lab a way of ‘affective computing’ – comput- ing that can generate emotional or affective response entering the mainframe. I think that’s going to be the big story of our lifetimes.”


24 Marketing Age Volume 4 Issue 3 2010


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68