Viral Advertising

Viral advertising is a type of advertising generally delivered by 'word of mouth' which is free to use as a method of advertising something. Often in the form of video clips, viral advertising can be used to advertise a wide range of products, companies and films. In order to make viral marketing/advertising work, there is three sets of criteria which must be met.

1.  Messenger: Three specific types of messengers are required to ensure the transformation of an ordinary message into a viral one: market mavens, social hubs, and salespeople. Market mavens are individuals who are continuously ‘on the pulse’ of things (information specialists); they are usually among the first to get exposed to the message and who transmit it to their immediate social network. Social hubs are people with an exceptionally large number of social connections; they often know hundreds of different people and have the ability to serve as connectors or bridges between different subcultures. Salespeople might be needed who receive the message from the market maven, amplify it by making it more relevant and persuasive, and then transmit it to the social hub for further distribution. Market mavens may not be particularly convincing in transmitting the information.
2. Message: Only messages that are both memorable and sufficiently interesting to be passed on to others have the potential to spur a viral marketing phenomenon. Making a message more memorable and interesting or simply more infectious, is often not a matter of major changes but minor adjustments.


3. Environment: The environment is crucial in the rise of successful viral marketing – small changes in the environment lead to huge results, and people are much more sensitive to environment. The timing and context of the campaign launch must be right. - Derived from Wikipedia (source: Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein.  http://www.escpeurope.eu/nc/faculte-recherche/corps-professoral-escp-europe/professor/name/kaplan/-/research/ 

Kaplan Andreas M., Haenlein Michael, (2010), Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of social media, Business Horizons, Vol. 53, Issue 1, p. 59-68

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This piece of viral advertising is used to advertise the Blendtec blenders. The company have many advertisements, captioned 'Will It Blend?', posted on YouTube which show their blenders as the 'world's best blenders'. The clips feature several products - not typically placed into a blender - being ground down to almost dust. This particular clip involves the blending of the iPad.

The videos feature Blendtec founder, Tom Dickson, destroying a variety of expensive or unusual products, most notably the iPad and the iPad 2 as well as a tiki torch, a golf club and even glow sticks. The adverts have been incredibly successful on YouTube achieving over 1 million views per episode. A comedic element is used within the advertisements as with many viral ads. This type of viral marketing is advertising the company, Blendtec and its products. Viral advertising can be used for a variety of different things.