AdNausea

“For many years, word of mouth has been thought to be almost irresistible.”
Johan Arndt

And I am of the belief that it still is. Don’t believe me? Take a look at this post.

A bit of history.
One of the first things written about viral marketing (aka word of mouth marketing or virtual marketing) was by Douglas Rushkoff in his 1994 book Media Virus. It says that if an advertisement reaches a “susceptible” user, that user will become “infected” 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, standard in epidemiology imply that the number of infected users will grow according to a logistic curve, whose initial segment appears exponential.

So, in simpler AdNausea terms - if a campaign, for example, is so packed full of awesomeness that someone sees it and has to pass it on to everyone in his address book, talk about it in class, etc. and he does this with more than one person and they each decide to sign up for an account or view the webpage or whatever the goal of the campaign is, the number of viewers will grow exponentially. Or… lots and lots of people will be looking at your awesomeness and you don’t have to pay to get it out there.

A few examples.
One of the best ones I can think of, and was also included in the glossary I posted a few days back, is Burger King’s Subservient Chicken. Now, I’ve never been a huge fan of Burger King, but I am a huge fan of CP+B (If you guys are reading this - I love you so much! Hire me and make me your advertising slave!) which is the ad agency that put this together. I will do a full company profile of these amazing people, because they are genius. But basically - how many ads did you see saying “Go to Subservient Chicken.com and check us out?” None! No TV commercials. No flyers. No print ads. Nothing. It was handed off to a few select people who in turn told all their friends, who told all their friends, who told you. And you know you’ve seen it. And yes, he does the moondance, but he will not do dirty things. Although it’s fun to try. The idea of a chicken that would do whatever you wanted stemmed from the Burger King slogan, “Have it your way.” And I think it’s sheer genius considering millions of people viewed this and there was no formal advertising done, just word of mouth.

Another good one is for the Honda Element. I can’t find an active link to this campaign, which makes sense since it’s pretty old, but on the same token, makes me very sad that if you haven’t seen and played this, you may never get the chance to. Remember when these ads came out for the Element featuring this “mish-mash of a car” talking with animals in funny voices? Well, they made a game about it. You could control your Element with the arrow keys, speed up and brake and your mission was to cruise the environment and discover all your little animal friends and talk with them. While the campaign was advertised, this game wasn’t. I was shown in a class I was taking and of course, I passed it on to everyone I knew who had a cute sense of humor and like crabs. (”No Peench! No Peench!”) Sorry it’s no longer active though, what a bummer.

A few short ones:

• Cadbury’s Dairy Milk 2007 Gorilla advertising campaign was heavily popularised on YouTube and Facebook. It makes me full of glee on the insides of my happy glands. No advertising.

• The marketing campaign for the 2008 film The Dark Knight combined both online and real-life elements to make it resemble an alternate reality game. Techniques included mass gatherings of Joker fans, scavenger hunts around world, detailed and intricate websites that let fans actually participate in “voting” for political offices in Gotham City, and even a Gotham News Network that has links to other Gotham pages such as Gotham Rail, a Gotham travel agency, and political candidate’s pages.

• The release of the 2007 concept album Year Zero by Nine Inch Nails involved a viral marketing campaign, including the band leaving USB drives at concerts during NIN’s 2007 European Tour. This was followed up with a series of interlinked websites revealing clues and information about the dystopian future in which the album is set.

Word of mouth is a powerful tool and viral marketing is exactly what it says - a virus that spreads and infects as many people as is possible. Although… the gorilla video is a better type of virus than say… the common cold. So enjoy! And when you pass on that funny website with the game you can play to all of your friends - just know that you are advertising heavily for whatever product backs that game. It’s a good thing.

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