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Loading ...Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can often be word-of-mouth delivered and enhanced online; it can harness the network effect of the Internet and can be very useful in reaching a large number of people rapidly.
Some of the first recorded offline / online viral campaigns were developed by Tim Nolan of Spent2000.com fame circa 1996. By placing abstract pairings of catch-phrases, quotes, song lyrics and image mashups, Mr. Nolan developed a method of creating “buzz” around a URL based installation. Phrases like “This city isn’t safe” placed along side a URL created curiosity enough in people’s minds to remember a URL and visit again once they were online.
Viral marketing sometimes refers to Internet-based stealth marketing campaigns, including the use of blogs, seemingly amateur web sites, and other forms of astroturfing, designed to create word of mouth for a new product or service. Often the goal of viral marketing campaigns is to generate media coverage via “offbeat” stories worth many times more than the campaigning company’s advertising budget.
The term “viral advertising” refers to the idea that people will pass on and share interesting and entertaining content; this is often sponsored by a brand, which is looking to build awareness of a product or service. These viral commercials often take the form of funny video clips, or interactive Flash games, an advergame, images, and even text.
Viral marketing is popular because of the ease of executing the marketing campaign, relative low-cost (compared to direct mail), good targeting, and the high and rapid response rate. The main strength of viral marketing is its ability to obtain a large number of interested people at a low cost.
The hardest task for any company is to acquire and retain a large customer base. Through the use of the internet and the effects of e-mail advertising, the business-to-consumer (B2C) efforts have a greater impact than many other tools of marketing. Viral marketing is a technique that avoids the annoyance of spam mail; it encourages users of a specific product or service to tell a friend. This would be a positive word-of-mouth recommendation. One of the most successful perspectives found to achieve this customer base is the integrated marketing communication IMC perspective.
History
Some argue the term viral marketing was originally invented by Tim Draper and coined by venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson in 1997 to describe Hotmail’s e-mail practice of appending advertising for themselves to outgoing mail from their users. The first to write about viral marketing was media critic Douglas Rushkoff in his 1994 book Media Virus. The assumption is that if such an advertisement reaches a “susceptible” user, that user will become “infected” (i.e., sign up for an account) and can then go on to infect other susceptible users. As long as each infected user sends mail to more than one susceptible user on average (i.e., the basic reproductive rate is greater than one), standard in epidemiology imply that the number of infected users will grow according to a logistic curve, whose initial segment appears exponential.
An even earlier reference can be found in Richard Brodie’s famous book, Virus of the Mind. Brodie worked for Bill Gates at Microsoft, who was quite aware of how information could spread quickly to win an argument and then a market.
If each user sends mail to more than one susceptible user then the campaign will in theory continue forever, or at least until all susceptible users have already received the message. Even if the message is not forwarded quite that often, the message might still be forwarded many more times than it was initially sent. For example, consider a campaign that starts out by mailing 100 users. Not all of them will forward the email, but some of them might. This ’some’ would be tested using market research; say, for example, that it turns out to be 80% and that each forwards it to only one friend. In this case, 80 people would receive a “first generation” forwarded message. From there it would decline roughly exponentially, so that each generation would be smaller than the next, as 80, 64, 51, 41, 33…
Eventually the campaign would fade out. Research must be carried out on the life expectancy of such a campaign. More complicated formulas can be generated, but this would be the easiest for most marketing departments to work out. So the final campaign would cost the original amount of funds needed to send the email to 100 users and the rest (357, in this case) would be users marketed by viral methods and normally for free.
Notable examples of viral marketing
* The spread of the R. Tam sessions for the 2005 film Serenity
* Burger King’s The Subservient Chicken and Coq Roq
* Carlton Draught: Big Ad campaign.
* Ford Motor Company’s Evil Twin campaign
* Gmail
* Heinz’s Ketchup Against Tomato Cruelty campaign
* Blair Witch Project
* I Love Bees - viral marketing for Halo 2
* Jamie Kane BBC sponsored online game
* McDonald’s “McRib Farewell Tour”
* Microsoft’s Origami Project campaign
* Microsoft’s Xbox 360 campaigns, called OurColony and Hex168
* Tupperware parties
* The Ring movie and its massive cursed video secret promotion
* The Ring Two movie promotion used another blank-label videotape ending with www.she-is-here.com, a website where users shared their unexplainable experiences with the cursed videotape
* Snakes on a Plane’s “Get a call from Samuel L. Jackson” campaign
* FX Networks’ use of Myspace pages as advertisements
* Sony’s viral videos promoting the 2005 release of the PS2 game Shadow of the Colossus through “giant sitings” on giantology.typepad.com/ and other sites. Convincingly created “home videos” and news reports depicting evidence of ancient giant creatures in India, the polar north, and Peru.
* Disco.app CD burning application for Mac OS X.
* The Rolling Rock Beer Ape commercials
* Sony’s Playstation Portable campaign, alliwantforxmasisapsp, which has been met with scorn.
* Apple Inc.’s Iphone campaign.
* Iron Maiden’s The Reincarnation of Benjamin Breeg single was preceded by viral marketing.
Via Wikipedia
Filed under: Buzz Marketing, Viral Advertising, Viral Marketing, Word-of-Mouth Marketing
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This is exactly what I expected to find out after reading the title All About Viral Marketing - New Marketing and New Media by Abraham Harrison LLC. Thanks for informative article