Viral marketing – Guest lecture at Berghs – School of the Year

This Friday I spent the afternoon away from the day to day business of JMW, and once again gave a lecture about viral marketing at Berghs School of Communication, the world’s best communication and advertising school.

The last time I was there, things had just started moving for businesses offering services around viral marketing, like seeding and tracking. Online video continues to grow, and now there seems to be an even greater understanding for viral and it’s potential.

As always, it is very rewarding to teach, and students often bring new perspectives.

One thing that surprised me a lot was the creativity of the students. I know they are supposed to be extremely creative, otherwise they wouldn’t be studying where they do. But being able to, in 20 minutes, come up with ideas for campaigns that might actually go viral, still impresses, no matter what prior expectations you have!

They are no doubt highly creative students, which is probably the reason the school had the most finalists of all schools in the Cannes Lions competition for future creatives – Future Lions. The secret sauce, says Berghs CEO Pär Lager:

“It’s pretty simple, it’s a lot of work. A lot of teaching from good teachers, that we only have professionally working teachers from the best agencies.”

It’s an honour to be included, both for me and JMW.