All Your Base Are Belong To Us!

If you played video arcade games in the late 80’s or early 90’s, you might remem­ber Zero Wing — a game in which a bat­tle takes place in the year 2101, where you must defend the planet Earth from an alien invasion.

Zero Wing may have been a favorite among teenagers, but like the Cab­bage Patch doll the fad faded… until Sega Gen­e­sis came out with their ver­sion of the pop­u­lar arcade game in ’98, giv­ing Zero Wing new breath.

But this time, one is offered an ani­mated intro­duc­tion in prepa­ra­tion for the space bat­tle, which started with: “In A.D. 2101, war was begin­ning.” And a dia­logue between the ship’s cap­tain and the dreaded war­rior Cats ensued, offer­ing these price­less gems:

• “You Have No Chance To Sur­vive Make Your Time.”
• “What you say!” “Some­one Set Up Us The Bomb!”
• “You know what you doing. Move ‘Zig’ For Great Justice!”
• And of course, “All Your Base Are Belong To Us.”

The result became a viral phe­nom­ena that spread quickly, first among early adopt­ing geeks, then to main­stream media. It has become so per­va­sive that it inspired a new gen­er­a­tion of web­sites show­cas­ing bad trans­la­tions, and the explo­sion in fail blogs.

Now, what does a video game have to teach us about copywriting?

Obvi­ously, this poor Japanese-​​to-​​English trans­la­tion made a few peo­ple grin. But this once little-​​known inside joke began appear­ing all over the place, from graphically-​​altered pho­tos to actual bill­board signs, TV news broad­casts, even comic strips.

Then the “All Your Base Are Belong to Us” phrase, or “AYBABTU,” started pop­ping up in the real world: shop­ping mall win­dows, city build­ing rooftops, even pop­u­lar soft­ware pro­grams — it also became a hacker’s favorite way to deface websites.

Just like the recent crash­ing squir­rel meme, pho­tos — some altered and some not — of road signs, store win­dows, prod­uct pack­ag­ing, pub­lic land­marks, celebri­ties, and even politi­cians don­ning “All Your Bases Are Belong to Us” insignias, invaded the Internet.

“It spread from office to office like a benign virus,” writes Chris Tay­lor in Time Mag­a­zine. But this virus may have had some help. In 2000, a part-​​time DJ decided to pro­duce a rock music video, which is essen­tially a mini-​​slideshow of “All Your Base” pictures.

Before the days of blogs and video-​​sharing web­sites like YouTube, the video was orig­i­nally cre­ated as a stand­alone Flash movie. As a result, the “All Your Base Are Belong to Us” video file started to make its rounds in mes­sage forums and email…

One per­son even cap­i­tal­ized on the phe­nom­ena by sell­ing AYBABTU mem­o­ra­bilia.

Ulti­mately, what started as a tiny inside joke among geeks has grown so rapidly and became so ubiq­ui­tous that it was dubbed, accord­ing to sev­eral national news­pa­pers such as USA Today and The San Fran­sisco Chron­i­cle, a world­wide “conspiracy.”

Is it really a con­spir­acy? No. Is it just a fad? Maybe.

But one thing’s for sure: whether it was inten­tional or not, it was bril­liant viral mar­ket­ing since it used, as its spring­board, one of three essen­tial response-​​boosting ingredients:

Curios­ity, scarcity, or controversy.

Online, using one of these three ele­ments can dra­mat­i­cally boost both your read­er­ship and your response. And viral forms of pub­lic­ity can become tremen­dously effec­tive — the news can spread very quickly and effort­lessly if done right.

If your sto­ry­line is unique or has a unique twist, if the offer focuses on a niche, and if the copy uti­lizes one of these three ele­ments above, not only will it increase con­ver­sions but also the knowl­edge of your exis­tence will spread almost naturally.

And using the Inter­net as a way to auto­mate, lever­age, and increase the spread of that mes­sage can help to mul­ti­ply your mar­ket­ing… per­haps even exponentially.

Take some of the recent prod­uct launches in the Inter­net mar­ket­ing space. Sure, some of them used a vari­ety of strate­gic mar­ket­ing processes such as affil­i­ate marketing.

But to help cre­ate antic­i­pa­tion and pro­pel the buzz, they used things like “spy pho­tos,” social media, blogs, videos, reprint­able prod­uct reviews, social proof, spe­cial reports, con­tests, sam­ple tri­als and demos, inter­views, tele­sem­i­nars, white papers, you name it!

And people’s curios­ity glands were kick­ing into overdrive.

They were not all pos­i­tive, either. A few, such as cer­tain reviews, were not as flat­ter­ing. But good or bad, the most con­tro­ver­sial ones were the most mag­netic in terms of traffic.

But let’s take a look at viral mar­ket­ing for a moment.

Viral mar­ket­ing, which is merely word-​​of-​​mouth, is called such because it prop­a­gates from per­son to per­son. Online, it’s also called “word-​​of-​​mouse,” orig­i­nally coined if not made pop­u­lar by my friend Dr. Ralph Wil­son sev­eral years ago.

The rea­son is, viral mar­ket­ing often uses links, con­tent, pic­tures, and mul­ti­me­dia, which can be eas­ily down­loaded, copied, and spread around online. It can also be in the form of appli­ca­tions, such as scripts, refer­ral forms, tool­bars, book­marklets, quizzes, etc.

But videos, espe­cially con­tro­ver­sial ones (either by their very nature, or by piggy-​​backing on the coat­tails of a news item or cer­tain recent event, while it’s fresh on people’s minds), are pow­er­ful because they engage all the senses.

And the more senses you engage, reported by a Uni­ver­sity study, the greater the reten­tion, com­pre­hen­sion, and inter­est lev­els. Even as much as 224%.

Nev­er­the­less, one ques­tion remains…

Is viral mar­ket­ing lim­ited to the elec­tronic realm?

Yes, it is true that word can spread online with results that are faster and more far-​​reaching than any other form of word-​​of-​​mouth adver­tis­ing. But it can start offline, as well. If it con­tains any of the three ele­ments, the Inter­net will take care of the rest.

And today, with the help of social media and its inces­sant growth, both meme cre­ators and viral mar­keters have found fer­tile ground through which they can spread quite eas­ily and rapidly. Take these aston­ish­ing sta­tis­tics, for example…

Sim­ply add an ele­ment of curios­ity, scarcity, or con­tro­versy, and your mes­sage — and there­fore your vis­i­bil­ity — will pop­u­late emails, mes­sage forums, news­groups, social sites, and blogs. So if you can cre­ate a buzz about your busi­ness, site, or prod­uct, or even any kind of buzz through which you are vis­i­ble, you’ve got it made!

No files. No web-​​based scripts. Not even a website.

Here’s a case in point. Back in mid-​​2000, nearly half a mil­lion peo­ple a day were call­ing a New Jer­sey invest­ment firm’s voice mail just to hear the sound of a duck quack­ing.

Their auto­mated phone recep­tion sys­tem, which began with those typ­i­cal cor­po­rate prompts, such as “To make a claim, press one, to make changes to your pol­icy, press two, to talk to one of our rep­re­sen­ta­tives, press three,” etc, included as its last option…

… “To hear a duck quack, press seven.”

The bro­ker­age firm, which has a mal­lard as its mas­cot, decided to throw in the sound of a duck quack­ing as an option on their toll-​​free line. It was a joke at first. Being the last in a series of sev­eral prompts, they thought nobody would notice or even care.

But in a very short amount of time, peo­ple started call­ing the line just to hear the sound of the duck, tying up the brokerage’s phone sys­tem in the process.

Accord­ing to an arti­cle in Canada’s National Post news­pa­per, writer Robert Thomp­son reported that, at the end of the first week, only eight peo­ple lis­tened to the quack.

But word spread so quickly that, with the phone num­ber cir­cu­lat­ing through­out the web and par­tic­u­larly by email (remem­ber, this was before the term “social media” was even coined), more than 270,000 peo­ple called the num­ber dur­ing the first month.

“We didn’t do any­thing,” said the brokerage’s CEO. “We just left it on our voice mail…

… “The Inter­net took care of the rest.”

Was this lit­tle, seem­ingly inno­cent joke at all prof­itable? Sev­eral years ago, in an inter­view with Mike Bartlett of News​Bytes​.com, which is now part of the tech­nol­ogy sec­tion of The Wash­ing­ton Post, one spokesper­son offered this inter­est­ing insight.

He reported that, while the com­pany didn’t do any­thing to pro­mote the duck, the expo­sure the pop­u­lar fowl brought to the bro­ker­age firm resulted in a 75% increase in the num­ber of new accounts in each week of the first month alone.

Nev­er­the­less, the eas­i­est way to cre­ate buzz — although, admit­tedly, the process in itself may not be that easy and may require a lot of brain­storm­ing — so that you can lever­age it through viral mar­ket­ing is to develop your unique sell­ing propo­si­tion (USP).

Peo­ple are insa­tiably curi­ous about some­thing that’s new, dif­fer­ent, or bet­ter. They have an unquench­able appetite for the news­wor­thy, the intrigu­ing, and the sensational.

So find some­thing unique about you, your prod­uct, or your busi­ness, or give it a unique twist in some way. And then include it in every one of your com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Make it obvi­ous. Make it clear. Make it the focal point. And then watch it take off.

If you do this effec­tively, you will gen­er­ate word-​​of-​​mouth adver­tis­ing as a nat­ural byprod­uct. Read­er­ship will go up. Inter­est will go up. And of course, sales will go up.

Once you do, then in order to spring­board your viral mar­ket­ing you should add an ele­ment of curios­ity, scarcity, or con­tro­versy to your efforts. It’s such an intrin­sic part of great copy­writ­ing that I’ve ded­i­cated an entire chap­ter on it in my lat­est DVD course.

Now, I don’t mean you need to cre­ate fake con­tro­versy or, worse yet, lie. Peo­ple will see through your attempts and you will lose cred­i­bil­ity as a result. But you can, how­ever, man­u­fac­ture real con­tro­versy in the way you com­mu­ni­cate your USP.

(Why do you think most “how to” types of infor­ma­tion prod­ucts are sold on the basis of the “secrets” they con­tain? Peo­ple love secrets. And curios­ity is part of human nature.)

Scarcity is to make some­thing time-​​sensitive or lim­ited in some way. Peo­ple don’t know how much they want some­thing until it’s about to be taken away from them. I’m not talk­ing about limited-​​time offers. I’m talk­ing about the gist of your message.

Make your mes­sage time-​​sensitive, event-​​based, news-​​related, or quantity-​​bound.

Finally, you can gen­er­ate curios­ity by adding a sense of mys­tery, intrigue, or the unex­pected to your mes­sage — even an odd­ity, a secret, or an incom­plete story that only read­ing your copy or buy­ing your prod­uct can com­plete or reveal.

You can cre­ate con­tro­versy — or ride the coat­tails of an exist­ing one — by debunk­ing pop­u­lar myths, reveal­ing shock­ing infor­ma­tion, expos­ing little-​​known mis­takes, clear­ing up mis­con­cep­tions, chal­leng­ing mis­in­for­ma­tion, telling riv­et­ing sto­ries, or mak­ing bold claims — of course, all prop­erly backed up in your copy or product.

Then lever­age your mes­sage or its expo­sure by using resources and tools that can help stim­u­late curios­ity, buzz, and third-​​party refer­rals. For instance, write an ebook. Con­duct a sur­vey. Pen a white paper. Code a appli­ca­tion. Offer a mini-​​course. Record a video.

And don’t for­get to dis­trib­ute them freely on blogs, forums, and social net­work­ing sites, as well as through email, press releases, and of course, good ol’ arti­cle marketing.

If you do, you just might “set up you the sales.”

About the Author

Last 5 Posts By Michel Fortin

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