Listening – Magoosh TOEFL Lecture #2

Listening – Magoosh TOEFL Lecture #2

Question & Answers: https://t.me/MagooshTOEFLBreakthrough/16

Script:

Narrator:

Listen to part of a lecture in a marketing class.

Male professor:

I’ll assume everyone here has a basic idea of what viral marketing is. Can anyone give me an example of this way of advertising a product?

Male student:

Viral marketing is, um, when you’re shown an ad, but [sounding annoyed]… they don’t tell you it’s an ad.

Male professor:

Well, uh, yes… what you’re describing is—it’s a form of viral marketing. Can you give me a more specific example?

Male student:

Well, the other day, I was reading the news online, and I read a whole article about car safety. The article focused just on one car company that was taking a lot of safety precautions. And when I got to the end of the article, it said in tiny letters that the article was sponsored by that very car company! So it wasn’t really news—it was just a viral advertisement.

Male professor:

That is a pretty good example, Hank—Companies sometimes trick people into looking at an ad but not knowingthey’re looking at an ad. Then they’ll share that... “news” with their friends, and more people will hear the company’s message. This is a specific kind of viral marketing called stealth marketing. But, as—as I was saying, it’s just oneform.

Basically, viral marketing is anything a company does to try to get people—people other than ad reps for the company—to get people to talk about their product. Because usually if more people know about a product, more people will buy that product.

And this sort of marketing today is more common than ever, because with the Internet and mobile phones, people have more and more ways of talking to each other about the things they buy. So viral marketing’ll use social media—websites, cell phone apps—and get users to talk about a product. In viral marketing, the company gets other people to do their advertising for them, basically.

Female student:

Well, yeah, I use a lot of social media to talk to my friends… and companies that I like will send me messages about stuff I might want to buy—put the messages right on my personal page. And my friends can see those messages too—and I can see what they’re buying.

Male professor:

Right… so you and your friends wind up promoting stuff to each other through your personal pages. Sometimes this is because companies purchase keyword-based advertisements on social media websites. Based on the words you write on your page, certain product ads will show up. Other times, companies advertise directly to everyone, encourage people to link their products to social media. Either way, this counts as viral marketing, because it gets people talking to each other about what they want to buy.

Female Student:

So wait—if my friends and I just choose to put up a link to a company product, even if the company didn’t send anyone a message—that’s still viral marketing?

Male professor:

Right, it’s not just when the company is really proactive—even just giving someone a way to talk about a product online counts—as long as the company succeeds and people are actually talking. Again, viral marketing can be anytime where word-of-mouth—people communicating socially—is used to promote something.

So you really don’t need modern Internet for viral marketing. In the 1980s, the McDonald’s restaurant chain had a contest where customers could win prizes. People would get these plastic tickets with their meals, and they could redeem ‘em for discounts, free drinks, even cash, sometimes. The promotion included some traditional advertising—TV spots, newspaper ads, and such... but it was largely a word-of-mouth, viral campaign. The contest promoted itself the most by just getting people very excited—they started talking to each other about the McDonald’s contests, and going into McDonald’s to buy tickets and compare their winnings.

Contests and giveaways are probably the most common form of viral marketing, actually, and one of the oldest. People always get excited about contests, and excitement gets people talking. And when someone wins a lot of money from a company—or the company gives money to a charity or something—that’ll make the news. So you see, sometimes in viral marketing, a news story about a company isn’t planted—really good viral marketing campaigns give the media honest reasons to talk about a company, even promote it.