Viral Advertising

Viral advertising uses social networking sites, email and other approaches to gaining awareness for a new brand, or marketing through spreading viruses. There are a few ways that it can be spread: by word of mouth, via the Internet, or via mobile. It might take the form of games, e-books, video clips, web pages, email, text messages, or images.

There are 6 main reasons why people utilise viral advertising:

1. Gives away valuable products/services
2. Easy transfer to others
3. Easy scale from small to large
4. Takes advantage of common behaviour
5. Uses existing networks of communication
6. Takes advantage of others' resources

Examples of viral videos:

Promoting Evian




Promoting T-Mobile




HD Camera Trick Challenge


The first video draws on people's sense of humour, and uses an extreme to make us laugh. The second two pull on our curiosity.



Viral adverts for films:

For the Blair Witch project, instead of releasing a typical movie trailer, the producers released clips of the camera jostling and muffled sounds to attract curiosity and interest for when the film was finally released. This was a cheap way of advertising, and raised awareness and intrigued larger audiences to want to watch the film.

The singer held a contest on YouTube to encourage people to make their own music videos to her song Tik Tok. This also reached out to social networking sites, and people had to ask their friends to vote for them to win.

The Dark Knight's filmmaker Chris Nolan released images of the Joker saying 'See you in December' on the website www.whysoserious.com. It became instantly popular, and resulted in the film grossing 1 billion dollars worldwide.

Toy Story 3 released Ken-themed viral videos which were very popular. A few examples were 'Groovin with Kevin' and 'Ken's dating tips'.