Rob Young is a founding partner and senior vice-president, planning and research at Toronto-based Harrison, Young, Pesonen & Newell, one of Canada’s largest media management operations.

All of us in the ad business could learn a thing or two from the lowly worm – the computer worm, that is.

I came face to face with such a being about six weeks ago. This nasty little piece of programming mailed itself to me through a client’s Microsoft Exchange address book, destroying valuable computer files along the way.

The international computer community gave it the name worm.explore.zip. First discovered in Israel, it was submitted to the anti-virus centre on June 6, and by June 12 this giant killer worm was making headlines as it chewed its way through millions of North American hard drives.

So rapid was its movement through the international electronic ether that many of us found ourselves in direct personal contact with the worm just hours after being made aware of it. I first heard about the worm on a radio newscast while driving into work and, an hour later, found it on my computer. I can’t think of any other concern in the history of mankind that compares to the worm’s evolution from birth to international, face-to-face phenomenon in only six days.

I may despise the worm, but I admire its ability to carry its message through the computer medium with an acceleration rate resembling that of a nuclear reaction. And I can think of a number of clients who would love to apply some ‘worm learning’ to their media campaigns.

The primary lesson to be learned from the worm lies in its power of replication. Replication is the mechanism, built into the worm’s electronic genealogy, which accounts for its prodigious penetration of computer hard drives. It’s a mechanism that was well described in a New York Times story (‘Computer viruses life-like’, June 15, 1999) by John Markoff:

‘Like biological diseases, which exploit the most basic mechanisms of life – the power of DNA to replicate itself – a subculture of modern virus-writing now manipulates that same power of replication within the world of interconnecting computers.’

The replication mechanism comprised coded instructions that told the worm to invade computer e-mail address books, hijack the names within, and then mail off innocent-sounding messages, like this one:

‘Hi Fred. I’ll send you a reply to your e-mail but until then, take a look at the attached zipped docs. Sincerely, Rob Young’

The unsuspecting recipient would open the document, thereby infecting his computer and inadvertently providing the e-mail addresses of dozens of fresh new victims on whom to repeat the cycle.

Just like computer viruses, advertising messages move through the media environment like real, live biological organisms. An advertising message is absorbed by the host consumer where, one hopes, some kind of reaction takes place. The more virile the ad organism, the stronger the consumer reaction.

But does the metaphor hold up? Does the advertising organism contain the power of replication? Once consumed by the target group consumer, can advertising reproduce and ‘infect’ others, independent of the original transmission?

Sure. The mechanism within the advertising organism that produces the power of replication is word-of-mouth. If the creative message is effective and relevant, and if the media delivery vehicles are carefully selected, members of the target group will become ‘infected’ and the message will get talked about.

Word-of-mouth can create a multiplier effect that is truly magnificent. Imagine an ad campaign that could trigger, like the computer worm, 30 word-of-mouth contacts from each person reached by the campaign – and that they, in turn, would pass the word to 30 more.

If a media buyer placed a commercial into a TV program that generated 220,000 impressions (a modest movie on Citytv), the count would build to six million impressions after one multiplier stage, 200 million

after stage two and six billion (the world’s population) after only three rounds of word-of-mouth replication.

Advertising campaigns that generate word-of-mouth are capable of escalating message awareness by a significant factor within days or weeks of launch. In my opinion, every statement of advertising objectives should include getting people to talk. After all, there’s nothing more effective than a campaign that takes on a life of its own, triggering DNA-like replication through word-of-mouth.

Send your comments via e-mail to ryoung@hypn.com.