Effective Viral Marketing Campaigns

I spent some time in my earlier post explaining why the “Roller Babies” campaign for Evian worked, and why its new campaign will not go viral.

I truly believe that viral marketing is the single most effective way for advertisers to get attention to a product or service on the internet. Once a successful ad has been created, it will spread itself (like a biological virus) through the internet. Sounds simple, but viral marketing is tricky and success is hard to replicate. In an earlier post I went over what makes a viral campaign successful. I will now show some examples of two other creative campaigns that were wildly successful, and why they appealed to consumers. 

- The "Will it Blend?" campaign 

I absolutely love this campaign. Blendtec, a company that manufactures powerful, high-speed blenders, decided to upload videos on Youtube blending various things. Their video for "Will it Blend: Iphone" got over 8 million views on Youtube. 

What makes this campaign so great? It successfully combines advertising for not just one, but TWO different products, all while providing entertaining content to the viewers. I would be surprised if BlendTec is not getting paid to blend products, since its videos give the product a lot of attention. Recently, BlendTec has been blending a lot of Apple products, which only confirms my suspicion. 

The Last Exorcism: Chatroullete Campaign

Brilliant is the word that comes to mind for this campaign. 'The Last Exorcism' was an upcoming horror movie and its creators wanted to excite viewers about it. Their plan was to use ChatRoulette, a website that pairs random users for a web-cam based chat session, to find their targets. They recorded a video of an attractive girl who actively flirts with the person on the other end of the chat-session. The real person she is connected with doesn't know that she is a pre-recorded video, but thinks that they are talking to a real girl. But as the session continues, the girl starts becoming possessed with a demon. Her eyes roll back to the back of her head and begin to bleed, she begins to growl and scream and progressively become more terrifying, and finally lunges straight at the camera. After this, the screen goes black and the website address for 'The Last Exorcism' is shown. 

I thought this campaign was amazing, not only because of its shock value, but because the person on the other end of the web-cam session never sees it coming. Within days, the blogosphere was buzzing with this campaign, with videos of people and their reactions to the possessed-girl video. Everyone was talking about the movie, which was the goal of the producers.  (If you want to watch the video-- you can see it here, but be warned it is scary). 

What makes these campaigns great is their pure creativity and entertainment value. I think this type of viral marketing is the most effective because it has the potential to provide an immense amount of interest in consumer at a fraction of the cost of normal advertising.