“We want you to build an interactive promotion around snow. We want it to be viral. And oh yes, it should involve video. Now, go to it.”

Basically, that’s all the instruction The SuperGroup Creative Omnimedia, an Atlanta-based digital marketing agency, got when they were approached last year by The Weather Channel.

How do you make “snow” viral? And those of us located above the frost line and thoroughly sick of winter might add: Why would you need to?

Because some people associate the white stuff with more than wet feet and buried cars, and The Weather Channel wanted to tap into that audience, says Chris Wallace, interactive leader for the agency.

The SuperGroup had been working with TWC on a very small Web development project when the channel challenged them to figure out a way to promote some new programming: an online feature called “Top to Bottom” that gave a skier’s-eye view of complete ski runs at famous resorts, and a new network program, “Epic Conditions”, that showed high-def footage of all active sports involving weather. Unlike most of the programming on TWC, these were entertainment-oriented, not informational—something TWC didn’t think people turned to them for.

“Since they were simultaneously launching a portion of their www.weather.com Web site dedicated to the winter ski season, they thought it would be a good idea to do an online marketing campaign to get people to make that mental switch and start thinking of them as an entertainment outlet,” says Wallace.

TWC realized that would involve doing something different from most of their previous promotions. “We wanted to do something a little more standout than our brand typically is,” says Derek Van Nostran, director of marketing for The Weather Channel Interactive. “Over here we’re sometimes not seen as the hippest, most forward-thinking group. People have a preconceived notion of what The Weather Channel stands for. So we need to do something a bit younger, a little more interactive, that would add a bit of humor to our brand that isn’t there now for the average viewer.”

The Weather Channel folks were upfront about the amount of resources they would not be putting into promoting the new snow Web site. There would be no network promotion for the site, and online only a link on the main Web site. The Supergroup, TWC made clear, would have to carry the whole burden of driving traffic to whatever page they created. “They were looking to us not only to make the new site noteworthy on its own but to get out and pound the pavement,’ Wallace says.

The agency did get some direction out of TWC’s audience demographics, which indicated that the largest component of the audience was women over 30 but that males 18 to 35 were severely underrepresented.

“We wanted to come up with something that was kind of tech-savvy, because that appeals to that demographic,” Wallace says. “But we also wanted it to have a general or universal appeal and be entertaining enough to appeal to a wider audience than just those 18-to-35 males.”

What The SuperGroup came up with was www.SnowJoke.com, a Web site that mashes up Flash footage of actual skiers and lets visitors customize those shots by uploading their photos and choosing their own spoken messages. Users can choose to customize a retro-style long-board skier, a snowboarder or a skiing couple with a selection of hats, wigs and goggles. Those too timid or lazy to schuss or shred themselves even in virtual reality can substitute the heads of Abe Lincoln, Karl Marx or the Easter Bunny.

For speech users can choose from preselected phrases (“I can see my Miata from here!”), type in their own or phone a toll-free number and record a custom greeting. Once they’ve finished personalizing and have viewed the video, they can forward it to a friend or embed it in a personal Web page.

Links on the main SnowJoke page also point to the “Top to Bottom” section of the Weather.com site and promote the site’s large directory of resorts and ski condition reports. A banner at the bottom promotes “Epic Conditions” with programming times and a link to another Weather.com page that shows a different extreme sports weather video each week.

The site rolled out in mid-December, and within a month had received 40,000 unique views and led to the creation of 70,000 videos—pretty good for a promotion that had to stand basically on its own.

“I’m pretty sure The Weather Channel were pretty pleasantly surprised, especially given the short period of time to build those numbers,” Wallace says.

With a bit of luck and some welcome planetary revolution, the ski season will close down in the Northern hemisphere by the end of the month. But while there’s been no decision about keeping the SnowJoke site up and running for the surfing crowd, Wallace says it would be doable from his agency’s standpoint.

“That was a concern at the onset: If this is a success, can we apply the same marketing methods to a parallel campaign?” he says. “They haven’t asked us to go down that road yet, but the answer is yes.”