Viral marketing... it's a wonderful thing In December, 2009, podcasters of The Mike O'Meara Show launched a viral marketing campaign on Facebook to encourage others to download the show. The Ponzi scheme and related investment Pyramid schemes, are early examples 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 1960s and '70s (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 representatives and greatly enriches adopters. Examples include Amway and Mary Kay Cosmetics among many others. 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 tapes 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!"[4] 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.[5] Burger King's The Subservient Chicken campaign, running from 2004 until 2007, was cited in Wired magazine as a striking example of viral or word-of-mouth marketing.[7] Cadbury's Dairy Milk 2007 Gorilla advertising campaign was heavily popularised on YouTube and Facebook. 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 whom the campaign targeted.[8][9] 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.[10][11] 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.[12] In 2007, Portuguese football club Sporting Portugal integrated a viral feature in their campaign for season seats. In their website, a video 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.[13] 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.[citation needed] 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. 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 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. [14] 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 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. Both the second and third games in the Halo series were preceded with viral marketing in the form of an alternate reality game called I Love Bees for the second game, and Iris for the third game. Recently, Viral Video Clips which is directly based upon the forthcoming direct-to-dvd film S. Darko is released on the internet. One focusing on a camera footage featuring a civilian killed by a product from Tangent Universe and one which is a fan-made-style video involving theories of people being killed by stuffs from a Parallel Universe including Donnie Darko himself. "Will it blend" - the founder of Blendtec, Tom Dickson, blends various items (such as light bulbs and iPhones) in a Blendtec blender in an ongoing series of YouTube videos, which has gained a large internet following.
