Everyone talks about The Long Tail, but what is it, where did it come from and how does it apply to digital marketing? The phrase was coined by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired in an article published in that magazine in October 2004. It made a huge impression immediately and Mr Anderson subsequently expanded his theory into a book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.

The theory refutes the long-held wisdom of the 80/20 rule whose premise is that 80% of sales would be made on the 20% of the inventory. The arrival of the Internet as a mass medium has proven this wrong. Amazon says 50% of its total sales come from a wide range of items that only sell once a month, while eBay’s staggering success came from auctioning obscure items.

The classic graph below illustrates the Long Tail. The Long Tail theory is that the Long Tail equals the Head in size; that collectively many products account for as many sales as the few bestsellers.

Away from the Internet, even bricks and mortar video retailer Blockbuster claims that half the films rented each month do not come from the top 100. Apparently customers buy films they know or that are in the top 100, but prefer to preview less well known movies at home before making a purchasing decision.

However, the Long Tail isn’t universal. Mobile is the big exception. Here the business model could more accurately be described by what BKI Media terms the Short Head – that is, that the first massive peak in take-up will contribute almost all the revenue and the Long Tail will barely exist.

Western Europe is full of pastiche and nostalgia, with lots of new music in fact being a remix of old tracks or sounds from the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s. Certainly this repackaging appeals to some of those who remember the tracks the first time round (and who might continue to buy the original records online as a Long Tail purchase), but equally it attracts a new, mostly younger audience.

These people are likely to view a riff or track as super cool for a short time, often because it had been used for a TV advertising campaign. Recent examples include Status Quo’s hit Matchstick Men from 1968, which is now more famous as the backing track to the Gordon’s Gin advert. Likewise The Chi-Lites’ 1971 hit Have You Seen Her, used by Hutchison to promote music downloads on its 3 network, has got a huge new lease of life.

In mobile, immediacy – ‘nowness’ – is almost everything, so it’s crucial that things can be found quickly and easily through vertical options such as “most used”, “most read”, ‘top ten” or “most popular”. Mobile service providers themselves play to the Short Head model by constantly refreshing on-deck content to keep people engaged and making fresh purchases.

In the maelstrom of argument that the principles of the Long Tail, including the Short Head, has generated, perhaps the most important aspect of all has been almost lost – the unprecedented opportunity to cross-sell.

The user interface, personalisation, recommendation and navigation have at least as big an effect on sales as the content itself, although as we have just illustrated, these present differently on mobile than they online, but they apply to both. And although they comprise different strands of digital marketing, people are distinguishing less and less between their use of the online and mobile world, it’s all part of the same digital life.

This was shown perfectly by Scott Kelliher, director, mobile media services, Virgin Mobile USA, speaking at an Informa conference in New York at the beginning of March. Last year Virgin Mobile USA launched a rewards programme, Sugar Mama, through which its customers (none of whom are on contract), receive free calling minutes and texts in return for watching adverts. It has been hugely successful, signing up 50,000 customers in the first two weeks. As of 6^th March users had collectively earned 5 million minutes of air time.

Now Virgin Mobile USA has added another level of sophistication, moving Sugar Mama users between the desktop and their mobile and back again to complete a single, reward-earning task with only a 4% drop-out rate. As Mr Kelliher put it, “This is one of the coolest things…they don’t think about using [a means of communication] vertically, only about communicating digitally”.

Consequently, the key to exploiting the Long Tail and Short Head models in different media for cross-selling is timeliness and cross-platform coordination. A triple or quad play service provider needs to be able to offer a Have You Seen Her ringtone or ringback, wallpaper, video clip and track download on-deck as well as promoting a pay-per-view offering of the Chi-Lites performing the song and/or other artists who’ve covered the song (MC Hammer) and/or other Chil-Lites hits and/or if ‘you liked that, you’ll love this’ recommendation. And of course, the same type of offerings for those who prefer to go to the service provider’s online portal to get at the goodies.

It’s a way of mining the Long Tail. To do it effectively, service providers need a sufficiently flexible platform from which to launch a diverse array of products quickly, including in real-time if appropriate, such as to coincide with a concert; they need to lead innovation to exploit the limited window of opportunity for content-related offerings. But that’s not all.

In this very new world of cross-platform selling that exploits the Long Tail and Short Head simultaneously, they also need to be able to capture and analyse customer preferences and lifestyle to support one-to-one marketing and gain a deeper – as well as wider – understanding of their customers, what they like to do and how and when they like to do it. This knowledge will contribute enormously to all sorts of future campaigns that win by a Short Head, pulling the Long Tail with it.


First published December 2007 on the Pontis blog: http://www.pontisblog.com/2007/12/11/long-tail-short-head-unprecedented-cross-selling/#more-44
Written by Bena Roberts (Edited by Annie Turner).