Pulling a Hat Out of a Rabbit: Creating Perpetual Viral Marketing

Viral marketing relies on consumers to promote, create and experience branded content in order to generate greater brand awareness, with successful campaigns achieving a much broader scale of recognition than initially anticipated.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - February 6, 2007

Suwanee, Georgia - In 2001 Zero Wing, a little known and poorly translated Japanese video game, provided the basis for one of the pioneering viral campaigns: "All Your Base Are Belong to Us." It was adopted by several leading Internet humorists and made its rounds through various websites, with fans of the phrase remixing the cut scene featuring the phrase into music videos while traditional media picked up on the popularity of the phrase and incorporated it into episodes of several television programs, comics and video games. Another more recent example of of a successful viral campaign were the animated political cartoons created and distributed by JibJab.com during the 2004 presidential campaign. The cartoons achieved such notoriety that they were featured on segments of the broadcast network's nightly news programs.

The extent to which a popular viral media effort can penetrate the public consciousness is much greater than the ability of a "fire-and-forget" series of television commercials aimed to increase brand awareness. By capitalizing on the creative output of media consumers and the dynamic nature of digital content, generating the right idea to latch onto the public consciousness and generate the free publicity a viral campaign brings is every marketer's dream. There is a price however: With the benefits a successful viral campaign affords, there is a great deal of risk in the loss of content control and the chance that the proposed viral campaign never takes off if it is too closely tied to a brand and seen as over-commercialized. Yet the risk factors can be mitigated through the utilization of focus groups and a thorough understanding of the demographics, vehicles and platforms for a viral campaign.

Research and implementation of viral campaigns by Adreka indicates a high degree of consumer awareness of what constitutes a viral campaign, with a significant skew towards younger people. Over one-third of consumers also tend to forward viral text messages to at least one other person, with the content with the highest likelihood to be forwarded being humor related.