Notable examples of viral marketing
The Ponzi scheme and related investment Pyramid schemes, are an early and unfortunate example of viral marketing. In each round, investors are paid interest from the principal deposits of later investors. Early investors are so enthusiastic that they recruit their friends resulting in exponential growth until the pool of available investors is tapped out and the scheme collapses.
Multi-level marketing popularized in the 1960's and 70's (not to be confused with Ponzi schemes) is essentially a form of viral marketing in which representatives gain income through marketing products through their circle of influence and give their friends a chance to market products similarly. When successful, the strategy creates an exponentially growing network of reprepresentatives and greatly enriches adopters. Examples include Amway and Mary Kay Cosmetics.
BusinessWeek (2001) described web-based campaigns for Hotmail (1996) and The Blair Witch Project (1999) as striking examples of viral marketing, but warned of some dangers for imitation marketers. [8]
Burger King's The Subservient Chicken campaign was cited in Wired as a striking example of viral or word-of-mouth marketing. [9]
In 2000, Slate described TiVo's unpublicized gambit of giving free TiVo's to web-savvy enthusiasts to create "viral" word of mouth, pointing out that a viral campaign differs from a publicity stunt. [10]
Cadbury's Dairy Milk 2007 Gorilla advert was heavily popularised on YouTube and Facebook.
With the emergence of Web 2.0, mostly all web startups like facebook.com, youtube.com, collabotrade.com, myspace.com, and digg.com have made good use of Viral Marketing by merging it with the social networking.
The Big Word Project, launched in 2008, aims to redefine the Oxford English Dictionary by allowing people to submit their website as the definition of their chosen word. The viral marketing project, created to fund two Masters students' educations, attracted the attention of bloggers worldwide, being featured on Daring Fireball and Wired Magazine. [11]
The 2008 film Cloverfield was first publicized with a teaser trailer that did not advertise the film's title, only its release date: "01·18·08." Elements of the viral marketing campaign included MySpace pages created for fictional characters and websites created for fictional companies alluded to in the film.
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.
In 2007, World Wrestling Entertainment promoted the return of Chris Jericho with a viral marketing campaign using 15-second cryptic binary code videos. The videos contained hidden messages and biblical links related to Jericho, although speculation existed throughout WWE fans over who the campaign targeted.[12][13] The text "Save Us" and "2nd Coming" were most prominent in the videos. The campaign spread throughout the internet with numerous websites, though no longer operational, featuring hidden messages and biblical links to further hint at Jericho's return.[14][15]
In 2007 The New York Times' advertising columnist Stuart Elliott wrote about a business-to-business viral campaign for a software company, showing that viral advertising has application in areas outside of consumer marketing: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/business/media/09adnewsletter1.html
In 2007, Portuguese football club Sporting Portugal integrated a viral feature in their campaign for season seats. In their website, a video [16] required the user to input his name and phone number before playback started, which then featured the coach Paulo Bento and the players waiting at the locker room while he makes a phone call to the user telling him that they just can't start the season until the user buys his season ticket. Flawless video and phone call synchronization and the fact that it was a totally new experience for the user led to nearly 200,000 pageviews phone calls in less than 24 hours.
Avirginsplea.com claimed that a 25-year old virgin living in Toronto named Geoff needed five million hits on his website in 30 days in order for Jenn, one of his very hot platonic female friends, to help him lose his virginity.
On January 31, 2008 at 3 PM, radio station WMAX in Grand Rapids, Michigan dropped its Modern AC / Hot AC format and began stunting with the sounds of a ticking clock. A 12-second viral video posted on the station's website and on YouTube pointed to 02/04/08 @ 10:01 AM. In addition, liners that pointed to this date were also played, along with random songs from different radio formats. Sure enough, on February 2, 2008 at 10:01 AM, the ticking clock sounds came to an end, and a new format, Modern Rock Radio X 96.1 was launched.
In April 2008, strange videos began appearing on Canadian music video channel MuchMusic. The videos, made by a blogger known only as phreak615, interfered with the station's signal, especially during the station's original signal programming. The videos, all of which were under 10 seconds long, pointed to phreak615.com, the URL of the signal hacker's blog. According to his blog, phreak615 is a self-proclaimed pop culture activist who apparently works for MuchMusic. It is being used to promote the MuchMusic Video Awards. The videos and signal hacking may have been inspired by the Max Headroom pirating incident that occurred on Chicago's WTTW 11 in 1987, as phreak615 had posted a link to that video on his blog.
Pre-Internet: Early in its existence (perhaps between 1988 and 1992), the television show Mystery Science Theater 3000 had limited distribution. The producers encouraged viewers to makes copies of the show on video tape and give them to friends in order to expand viewership and increase demand for the fledgling Comedy Central network. During this period the closing credits included the words "Keep circulating the tapes!"
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 the US and 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 movie also markets heavily off of word of mouth from the thousands of Batman fans.
A form of MLM promotion was formed in early 2008 called Spider Web Marketing. It's free video series that showed user how to generate multiple streams of income