Lou Weiss, Chief Marketing Officer, Shutterstock

1. How B2B marketing can leverage
viral marketing techniques
and breaking news
September 5, 2019
Lou Weiss
Chief Marketing Officer

2. Who am I?

3. 1. Is your marketing boring? Ours was.
2. Then we decided to make it not boring
3. It worked.
4. Here’s how we did it (The Viral Content cookbook)
5. You can do it, too.
6. Vegemite > Marmite
Today’s Agenda

4. Is your company’s
marketing boring?

5. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…

6. Textbook marketing
● Positioning
○ Feature Set
○ Specifications
○ Price
○ Rationality

7. Textbook marketing
● Positioning
○ Feature Set
○ Specifications
○ Price
○ Rationality

9. • Virality
• ‘I get you’
• A Gift

10. Fyrestock

11. Results
Brand and performance metrics are
trending up significantly:
● Performance metrics
● Google searches for “Shutterstock”
● Awareness
● Equity
● Customers and prospects calling us(!)
● Door-opener

12. “Show, don’t tell”
Our strategy

13. Setting the table

14. Our Strategy
• Be Remarkable--literally
remarkability=share-ability
• Show (don’t tell) what makes you great
this is marketing, not entertainment
• Have a Personality, but be who you are
you need them to remember you
• Design the contagion
the least obvious, most valuable point

15. Things heat up!

16. Over 2.3 million views on our owned channels…

17. Ad Creative & Director
Head of Marketing
Chief Marketing Officer Account Executive
Marketing Manager
Graphic Designer
Brand Strategist
Sr. Social Media Strategist
Head of Global Digital Marketing
Head of Social
Marketing Lead & Content
Specialist
Video Producer
Editor in Chief, Linkedin

19. There aren’t many winners in the
Fyre Festival mess: You’ve got
Netflix and Hulu... Now add
Shutterstock to the list.
Luxury vibes on a
deceptively small budget
Shutterstock parodies the Fyre
Festival campaign
(for millions of dollars less)
cleverly recreated the infamous
Fyre Festival ad using its own
stock footage as part of its new
global campaign "It's Not Stock".
Shutterstock’s campaign
proves that it doesn’t need
extraordinary costs to
produce such a spectacle.
Shutterstock wins the
Super Bowl

20. Original Fyre
promo video
Shutterstock’s
“Fyrestock” video
Trailer for new
Netflix Show, I-
Land
Full circle!

21. Game of Thrones

22. April Fools

23. Moon Landing

24. The Viral Content cookbook
• Be Remarkable--literally
remarkability=share-ability
• Show (don’t tell) what makes you
great
this is marketing, not entertainment
• Have a Personality, but be who you
are
you need them to remember you
• Design the contagion
the least obvious, most valuable point

25. A bit of epidemiology…a deeper dive into viral marketing
People are susceptible, infective, and then immune
• What do these words mean?
• How do we make the susceptible infective?
• How do we make the infective more contagious?
• How do we postpone immunity as long as
possible?
Value infections and generations, not duration.
Seeding the virus
How contagious is your virus?

26. Where it works

27. The Viral Content cookbook
• Be Remarkable--literally
remarkability=share-ability
• Show (don’t tell) what makes you
great
this is marketing, not entertainment
• Have a Personality, but be who you
are
you need them to remember you
• Design the contagion
the least obvious, most valuable point

28. You can do this!

29. Resources
1)Unleashing the Ideavirus,
Seth Godin
2)A wonky paper on the math
of epidemiology: loulinks.net/themath

30. Thank you!