Since its original creation and subsequent commercial introduction in the late 1980s, the internet has grown exponentially at an almost limitless speed. The internet, as its predecessors television and radio, is becoming the most dominant media for new marketing techniques. As video killed the radio star, will the internet kill the TV star as each new media consumes its predecessors.

Commercials have evolved. The clear, concise product messages of the past are often replaced with unusual, obscure short films, although some ads will still use the obvious approach when promoting a product. As the internet’s share of commercial sales grows, more companies are using its influence to introduce products to their intended market.

Due to the size and scale of the internet, web advertising needs to be more effective than ever before. At a time where adverts struggle to even reach their target market, viral marketing is quickly becoming cost-effective as the ‘virus’ concept spreads and more potential customers become ‘infected’. Viral Marketing is generally considered to be video clips, games, images, e-mails and recently text messages.

In the mid 1990s, Hotmail was offering free e-mail services, a revolutionary concept at the time. One of the first examples of viral marketing, Hotmail would offer free e-mail addresses with a simple promotional tagline. The message would spread through groups and communities rapidly and the campaign was a success. Hotmail had made its mark, the product had become well-known and popular and the brand had been established with just a small number of viral messages.

An early viral marketing campaign ensured the success of the film The Blair Witch Project (1999). The production team spent a tiny production budget of just 22,000 dollars and took 250 million dollars at the box office thanks to the viral. The marketing campaign relied heavily on word-of-mouth promotion, with internet chat rooms building anticipation and intrigue about the film’s content and time of release.

The Blair Witch Project was a movie with actors, however, prior to its release the film was rumoured to be a documentary by college kids that had gone terribly wrong. The rumours spread quickly and the infected would go on to infect more and more people. By the time the film was released, the buzz around it was at fever-pitch. The Blair Witch creators were pioneers of the viral ad, with viral marketing in its early stages – the standard had been set.

A great viral ad will gain attention and intrigue around a product, so consequently the product must be good, if not great. As the money spent on viral ads increases with the format’s popularity, the expectation on each viral will also increase. A viral ad’s success will be judged on the amount of views the clip achieves, not necessarily on the related sales.

Increasing sales is inevitably the main target for any company looking to use viral marketing, but the main objective of the ad will not be to promote a specific product. To prevent the viral being too similar to a conventional advert, the product or company name will not be a prevalent part or will be completely absent from the clip.

Recently, there have been many video clips that the viewer would not immediately associate with the product. A UK television advert for Dairy Milk chocolate emerged in September, 2007, featuring a gorilla playing drums to the Phil Collins song ‘In The Air Tonight’.

The advert, three times the length of a regular TV commercial, begins with a close-up of the gorilla’s face. As the camera begins to pan away, the song begins and the gorilla is seen to be seated behind a drum kit. He creaks his neck before launching into the emphatic drum solo. The final shot is the Dairy Milk logo with its slogan ‘A glass and a half full of joy’. The video currently has about two million views on youtube, a major success as a viral ad.

Companies of all sizes will be looking to benefit from the buzz surrounding viral marketing videos. One of the world’s biggest companies, Nike, launched the legendary video showing Brazilian footballer Ronaldinho hitting the crossbar four times in a row without the ball touching the floor. Viewed over 50 million times, the video is classed as possibly the best viral ever made. The confusion about how genuine the advert was, as seen in the case of The Blair Witch Project, only increased its popularity as communities shared the video and questioned how it was made.

A new viral ad launched by Holiday Extras, a UK-based company selling airport parking and hotels, features comedy actor Paul Kaye as a car-park proprietor. The clip, at 92 seconds, shows a hideous alternative to the service that the company aims to offer the customer. This inversion of a traditional television advertisement shows how far advertising has moved since it inception. Having only recently been launched, it will be interesting to see how many views the video receives.

A successful viral advert relies on viewing figures, not the popularity of the advert itself. The aim of the viral is to launch or reinforce a brand identity and to encourage word-of-mouth promotion. With little or no money involved, the viral can be seen by a massive audience who will then talk about it to non-internet users as well as fellow web-users. However, as the new media gains popularity and attention, the competition will become fierce, forcing viral ads to be more diverse and attention-grabbing than ever.

So, what will the future hold for viral marketing? As the internet becomes the dominant marketing tool for companies of all kinds, it will be used in different ways to promote products and services. As quickly as the viral marketing epidemic spread, a vaccine may appear in the form of new advertising techniques. It is the companies and advertisers that must stay ahead and attempt to infect the public with progressive, innovative campaigns.

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Imagine a world without television. Can you do it? Chances are if you were born in the last 40 years or so, you can’t. Everywhere we turn we are bombarded with video images, first on television, but now on everything from desktop computers to cell phones. In fact, videos are so popular online they sometimes are passed around and create a viral marketing effect; that is what makes them interesting to marketers. This article will share a few ways you can jump on the band wagon and use these viral video techniques to bring traffic to your site.

A popular way to get into the world of viral video marketing is to build a blog and frequently add videos. Use amusing video clips, interactive Flash games and moving images since these are most likely to catch your visitor’s attention and be shared with others. The Dancing Bush 2001 interactive game brought massive attention to what eventually became the largest private entertainment site on the internet. Sunsilk hair products gained attention when a YouTube (http://www.youtube.com) video “Bride Has Massive Hair Wig Out” went viral. Companies the likes of Halo, Blair Witch Project, Xbox 360, The Ring Movie, Sony, Playstation and FX Networks have all benefited from viral videos.

On effective way to make sure your video draws attention to your web site or brand is to include the site name (and URL) within a video as part of the entertainment. The more integrated the inclusion, the less your video is going to look like an advertising ploy. Of course, you might want to refer to your site or brand more than once, but don’t go overboard. On the other hand some successful viral campaigns, like Burger King’s “Subservient Chicken” didn’t mention a web site or brand anywhere; but people knew where the video came from and it attracted massive attention on the web.

Another way to make sure your viral video drives traffic to your site is to include a link close to the video on YouTube and Google Video. This will allow viewers to easily identify the source of the video and find their way to your site.

So once you have all this traffic on your site, what are you going to do with them? Well first off, be sure to encourage visitors to pass your video to friends. Then if at all possible add some means for the video to be emailed or added to a social bookmarking site. If you have built your site on a blog like WordPress, there are plugins to add that functionality to your site for you.

So get out there and start spreading a virus, a video virus that is.

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Viral Marketing could be a sneaky way to get people to know about you and your company. You get them to pass your advertisement along. And the promotion is so low cost that not investing in it could be downright business suicide. All it takes is a great idea, maybe a good addictive game, a funny story, or a fascinating Ebook or piece of software. Many ideas are still out there that will create gossip or a buzz. Often movies are promoted by using scandal and gossip to make them more popular. Remember the movie “The Blair Witch Project”?

Big companies have tried viral marketing and there have been many success stories with it. A classic example is Microsoft’s Hotmail. The creators utilized the scheme and it has worked wonders for them.

Now it’s your turn to use viral marketing to work wonders for you. Act now and reap the benefits Viral Marketing will provide for you and your sales figures.

Viral Marketing Overview

Viral Marketing, also known as Viral Advertising, is a marketing technique used to build the public awareness of your product or company. Many techniques are used to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product but by riding on a transferable item that is appealing enough to encourage the recipient to actually pass it on, along with the company advertisement.

In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of an item they will pass it on to their friends and family. In effect, someone known sponsors the item, such as a cool flash game, funny video, amusing story and such, and passes it on to another with the company brand or logo or the product’s description or any other content that helps promote the company or its product.

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because it is relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing utilizes the eagerness of one person to pas on the product. If a person sees the name of someone they know as the sender, they won’t block it and will open it as well.

Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates when they help in spreading their viral products. They rely on the number of recipients a viral marketing is expected to reach in determining the amount or number of incentives that are attached.

Using Viral Marketing to your advantage

The main and foremost advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your site and your company. You get to generate a flow of traffic of potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your existence.

Most sites and companies are catching on to the effectiveness of Viral Marketing and Advertising. Not using it could kill your business if the competition has adopted it. Along with other schemes and methods in promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization and such, viral marketing could easily push you ahead in the rating games.

Creativity.

This is one virtue a site must possess to lead the race in the ruthless competition in the Internet based business. With so much competition and rivalry, every available method of marketing must be employed.

It doesn’t matter if you have a killer product or a fantastically designed website, if people don’t know that you exist, it doesn’t matter, and you are not going to make it big. Worst of all, you business could just get killed.

While there are many methods and schemes used by e-commerce sites today, there are still some of those that can help you with an extra boost in the popularity ratings. One of these is the so called Viral Marketing.

While the term Viral suggests a virus, a word very much dreaded by all computer owners, it is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business; on the contrary it just might kill you. Everyone has had enough of all those pop up ads and spywares.

However, the viral effect, with the message about your website or product spreading from person to person, can have a powerful impact on the volume of traffic that visits your site, and correspondingly, your profits.

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