Viral the great idea?

By Kasper Johansen

At several occasions during my course on 'New media and convergence culture' the classroom discussion has turned to the topic of viral marketing, especially in the sense of YouTube clips. In this blog I want to take the discussion further and show some classic cases of great viral use, and also introduce a video made in Denmark. By this I want to stress the importance of "the good idea", as essential when dealing with this sort of marketing.

On Wikipedia viral marketing or viral advertising is referred to as marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses.

The potential of viral marketing is great because of the user participation of distributing the message and enhancing of the message through forum discussions and so on (Produsage). Viral marketing is especially interesting when you compare it to the huge expenditures that are necessary when dealing with the more classic mediums, but in many cases also hugely exaggerated, e.g. many web-services describe this form of advertising as better then the old ways of banners, tv-commercials, printed and so on. This means that they forget to inform people about the difficulties of the task of achieving the awareness from the public. It is especially troubling now a days, where fighting for the public's attention is the premises for companies that are trying to use the social platforms, which is because of the more selective nature of the users, and the raising competition among more and more companies on the field.

In order to capture the users attention the clip has to move the audience, happy, sad, mad, funny or furious is some of the feelings that has to be put in motion.

The unexpected is also a key word, which this clip about spray painting the AirForce One will show. To my knowledge this is one of the most famous cases of viral marketing, and it had a huge impact for Marc Ecko and his company, which was the front man behind the clip. This kind of viral marketing is portraying the importance of the good idea, which is something that make people stop and think, makes people interested in participating in the cause, which essentially has the potential of making them work for you in the sense of spreading the word. In this case, the clip started out on YouTube, and created a storm of reactions - was it real or not, who did it? At first nobody admitted that they where behind it, and that only created a bigger fuzz around it, and from being just another video on YouTube it moved/transcended to different mediums and became a big story on the news. After the first reactions Mark Ecko when public, and discribed how he rented a Boeing 747, and painted it as an exact replicate of the the real AirForce One - which again was a great story in the news and on the social-platforms. In my opinion the story was very smoothly orchestrated, because it played with some of the most serious stuff in USA. AirForce One has an almost mythical status of being the most secure observed property, besides only the white house, and to play with that perception is cleaver. These are some of the conditions that made this clip what it is.

From my own experience I have this next clip, which was made by some of my friends from Denmark, who was making an campaign video for a one of the smaller Political Parties called 'Enhedslisten'. The success of the video was limited, but did get some attention. The video is essentially portraying the party as having an environmental awareness, and standing by its principles. In the follow-up discussion we agreed that one of the biggest problems of the clip, was that it to some extent felt like a commercial, and thereby as something that was imposing on people. This meant that we video didn't really transcended to the medium, because the user where not really invited to participate, and therefore the video was not really using the potential of Web 2.0.

So.... What is the conclusion on Viral marketing? It must be something like that the clip has to matter to people, and it has to fit into the context of the present, take advantage of the present. You can not be outdated and have success, you have to take the present and use it. Therefore a bring you my own viral advertise for partying in Prague. But I have to warn you, what is shown in this video can be considered very disturbing, and maybe some scenes should be deleted.