It seems there’s been a spate of slick, innovative, moderately amusing, deliberately targeted advertising in the last few months produced exclusively by large companies but explictly designed to be linked to and forward as viral marketing. Probably the first instance that popped up on my radar is subservient chicken by burger king.
a) Is this a durable phenomena? Or is it going to be just another flash in the pan?
b) Will the field be crowded out with mediocrity or will viral marketing finally be an effective mecahnism for seperating the wheat from the chaff?
c) Was there anything inevitable about 2005? Could it have happened in 1990? 2000?
d) Do you think this is, on balance, a good or bad thing?
My thoughts are that, on the whole, it’s a very good thing. Despite the usual hostility most people have towards advertising, the last thing an ad firm wants to do is to piss off people. After all, pissed off people don’t buy products. However, it has traditionally been notoriously hard to judge the effectiveness of advertising which means that it pisses of people quite a lot. I think that the democratic nature of viral marketing means that both advertisers and consumers will benifit from cleverer ads which piss people off the least amount possible.
I think it was inevitable that it should happen anytime now but the rise of blogging and vast, semi-organised networks of emailing and sites devoted to finding the cool stuff on the web was neccesary to provide the enviroment for it. In reality, anytime after about 2000, it could have been successful, all that was required was one company to figure out it works and everyone will jump on the bandwagon.