Viral Videos, sun, etc.

Ladies and Gs,

From sunny Montpellier I send you our last session's viral video links and more...

First, there is angry man, a video that wasn't part of any marketing campaign but one of those videos that got emailed around a lot in the 90ies and thereby showed marketeers how big "contageous communication" could become. Don't try this at home though...

One of the first companies to turn the idea into a campaign was outpost.com. The company has vanished into oblivion but the tattooed kids continue to get the message out there.

While these two videos fall into the "funny" category, k-fee built an entire campaign around the also quite social idea of "play a trick on your loved ones/friends/co-workers". An example and another one. Turn up the volume for viewing pleasure...

The Blair Witch Project was a lowest budget movie ($35.000 production cost) that went on to become one of the major hits of 1999 (it grossed about $250.000.000, not counting DVD sales). Why? Probably because it had a viral campaign that was based on ambiguity (is it real or not?) and fit perfectly with what Henry Jenkins calls "provoke and reward collective meaning production". I just remember that my then boss at the web agency I worked at was on a major sugar high for at least a month. You can look at some of the trailers on youtube and there are parts of the original campaign online. This article has some of the viral background.

Anyways, I am in love with BlendTecs "will it blend" campaign - so simple and so pure. So will it blend? Golf balls, a golf driver, the iPod, .... Look at how many people saw that clip and think about how much it cost to produce that thing.

But as I said in one of my last posts about the Chevy Tahoe ads, viral can backfire. The moment you put something in the hands of the wired public / interactive audience it is difficult to stop the process. This happened with the Tahoe but also with the Sportka (1, 2). After Ogilvy decapitated that poor cat (3DSmax cat that is), the responses were not necessarily friendly as the press recounts.

And finally: how much do you think Sony spent on this very nice ad? You'll have the answer after the break...

To understand the crucial shift from a "broadcasting dispositif audience" to the interactive and connected audiences we have now, just consider this citation by Jeff Bezos (amazon.com, founder) in this interview: "Word of mouth is very powerful online, so that if you make a customer happy, they can tell 5,000 people. And if you make them unhappy, they'll certainly tell 5,000 people. So each customer can be his or her own ombudsman, and that's just bound to shift the balance of power toward the customer. "

do have a nice break,
B.