Archive of the 'Viral Marketing' Category

Scion, Toyota’s youth-oriented brand within a brand, does marketing differently, to say the least. The car maker has opted for the road less traveled in most of its online promotion, favoring independent film and music festivals, presence in virtual worlds, and hip-hop-flavored video as ways to promote its vehicles. more

Red Bull’s Tahitian wave shoot

Web marketers and developers talk glibly about offering site visitors an “immersive” experience. Quite often, that simply means being able to see all four sides of a running shoe.

But when the creators of a new site from energy drink Red Bull talk about immersion, they’re speaking pretty darn close to literally—as in, being able to look up and see 20-foot Pacific waves curling over your head. more

In many of the areas of promotion the Internet has given rise to, being around for ten years qualifies you as a pioneer. If that‘s true, then Streetwise Concepts and & Culture is practically the Lewis and Clark of social marketing, mapping out the territory for those who came after.

The Los Angeles-based agency got its start more than 10 years ago when now-CEO David Benveniste hired on to promote and manage a new band, System of a Down. Realizing that their label in 1998, Columbia, wasn’t planning to support the band’s first album with as much marketing or airplay as he thought advisable, Benveniste logged onto that new Internet thing. He began visiting chat rooms where young people got together to talk about music and asking members what bands they listened to. more

The video, it has to be said from the start, is damn funny. Three WASPs, decked in seersucker and pink polo shirts but carrying thug attitude, get their groove on, give a shout out to “MV—Martha’s Vineyard’, and start rapping about the joys of how good it feels to be a “New England gangsta”.

Straight outta Cape Cod

We’re keepin’ it real

We’re gonna have a party makes the ladies squeal

We’re gonna turn it on

With our parents’ riches

We’ll serve Smirnoff Raw Tea and finger sandwiches.

Think Newport With Attitude.

The “Tea Partay” video, for a new Raw Tea product line from Smirnoff’s progressive adult beverages (PAB) division, hit big in the summer of 2006 and picked up 3 million hits on YouTube, along with a Cannes Golden Lion award and other commercial honors. more

“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. more

Anti-smoking cartoon

You know the ads from Truth, the youth smoking prevention effort funded by a big 1998 master lawsuit settlement between the tobacco majors and 46 states? Since 2000 they’ve been educating young people about the dangers of smoking by publicizing tobacco industry marketing memos and analyzing the actual contents of cigarettes for elements such as ammonia and arsenic. Necessary work—but also necessarily grim.

So for its 2008 campaign, Truth has opted to lighten up and speak its piece through musical numbers and cartoon characters. Needless to say, the “Sunny Side of Truth” goes heavy on the irony, with TV spots feature use dancing leprechauns and speculate that 5 million tobacco-related deaths around the world in 2007 may just be a typo.

The campaign also relies heavily on online components to drive viral spread: so much so, in fact, that for the first time Truth isn’t including any print in its media buy, just TV (primarily cable channels such as MTV, VH-1, Fuse and ABC Family) and the Internet. more

Everyone can point to disappointing sequels that failed to re-capture the excitement of the original: “Fantasia 2000”. “The Two Jakes”. “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo”. When you’re creating a product for popular culture, it’s just hard to put that second bottle of lightning up on the shelf.

Apparently Office Max and the agencies behind the “Elf Yourself” viral campaign haven’t heard about the sophomore slump. The team scored a big holiday 2006 viral success with the campaign, in which users get to download their face to a spindly elfin body and then shake their groove thing for e-mail friends. So when the holiday season rolled around again in 2007, OfficeMax, ad agency Toy New York and digital content company EVB decided to up the ante to four elves per e-mail and add some showier dance moves and voice capability but essentially keep the rest of the campaign the same. more