Viral Marketing

In the early days of the internet, marketers were sceptical about its utility in advertising everyday products.

Things have changed since then. As more of our activities have moved online, advertisers too have attempted to harness the speed and spread of information dissemination that the Net makes possible.

This was earlier restricted to text ads or pop-ups and banners that were at best little more than irritants to consumers and not very effective. But with the rise of Web 2.0 and its emphasis on user-generated content and social networks, advertisers have found a new way to get their message across. It's called viral advertising.

The digital equivalent of word of mouth, viral advertising involves companies or marketers creating messages so funny and interesting that consumers feel compelled to forward them to their friends and family.

The first real example of viral success was a video created to promote an American fast-food chain in 2004. Since then, viral advertising has become a popular tactic to woo consumers to products as diverse as movies and detergent.

The latest Batman film, for instance, used viral marketing to great effect and stoked the interest of customers to a fever pitch pre-release , with the result that the film had the biggest opening weekend in movie history. Indian companies are now getting into the act; a viral promoting a chewing gum is doing the rounds on e-mail.

Marketers employing word of mouth as a tool to create goodwill about their product is hardly radical. But the Web amplifies the word of mouth phenomenon and transcends geographical boundaries. Viral marketing is also popular with advertisers because it is free and comes from someone the consumer knows.

It's difficult to tell with a viral video whether some marketing maven created it or if it was the work of an amateur.

Advertisers also fear virals, of course, because it is outside their control. But few marketers monitor negative buzz. The gains outweigh the risks.

Viral advertising, however, could create difficulties for traditional media, which relies on advertising as its primary source of revenue. Already, the internet is eating into ad spend for print and, to a smaller degree, television.

For instance, Google reported a 42 per cent jump in revenue in the first quarter of 2008 over the same period in 2007, while a leading American newspaper company saw its revenue slip 4.9 per cent and advertising revenue drop 9.2 per cent.

With the availability of a popular and largely free method of marketing like virals, more companies could start diverting their advertising expenditure online.