November 5, 2007
Posted by Lars-Christian
5 Successfully Executed Viral Marketing Campaigns
Viral marketing, or buzz marketing if you prefer, is by no means a new thing within the marketing scene. Ever since people became employed as marketing experts, they have been tilting their heads each and every way in order to come up with new and creative ways to get people to talk about the products they are promoting.
With the exponential growth of the Internet in the past decade and a half however, the fundamentals of communication have changed radically, and the way marketing campaigns can influence customers to spread the word about various products has all of a sudden become easier to influence and predict. Because of this, the number of viral marketing campaigns has increased substantially the past few years.
The goal of viral marketing campaigns is to utilize a creative approach in order to get people to talk about (and promote) your product, and often people will not even be fully aware of what specific product they are talking about. This article examines some of the most successful viral marketing campaigns in the past few years, and as we will see there are no ends to what lengths marketers will go to in terms of creativity in order to get people to talk about a product.
1. Coca-Cola Zero (soft drink)
In the spring of 2007 posters proclaiming that “Zero is More” and that “Zero will give you life as it should be” started to appear all over Northern Europe. These posters also contained a date, April 1st, and a link to a cryptic website hosted at zeroismore.xx (xx being the corresponding TLD of the countries the posters appeared in).
People began to wonder, and more importantly talk about what revolution it was that would be taking place, and all over the Internet you would find discussions pertaining to the meaning of “Zero“. Of course when people realized that it was simply a new flavor from Coca-Cola, they might have been a little disappointed. The guys behind the campaign however were most certainly pleased with the amount of buzz that was generated. As an example of how successful the campaign was, I can mention that at one point during the summer they were not able to meet the demands because they were short-supplied with the trademarked black bottle caps the Zero bottles feature.
2. Batman – The Dark Night (movie)
The movie might not be screening for another eight months, but the early marketing efforts Warner Bros have made to promote it already stands as a bright and shining example of just how effective a viral marketing campaign can be, even within a limited budget.
Starting out with only a simple teaser page featuring the image above, fans were ecstatic when they proceeded by clicking the image and found themselves redirected to a page that featured a District Attorney Election promotional poster for a known character from the Batman Universe named Harvey Dent. This page again sent us to the real trick of the campaign (a site which is no longer active), another promotional poster, only this one defaced and seemingly mockin Harvey Dent. This page would also let users interact with the campaign by entering the email address which would give them a code that would reveal a few pixels of an image hidden “under” the defaced campaign poster.
Of course people immediately spread the word in order to get the full image revealed, and within hours the page instantly became popular on various forms of social media, and generated a lot of interest from online publications including blogs and newspapers. Naturally it didn’t take more than a few hours before the entire image was exposed, and it contained a somewhat creepy rendering of Heath Ledger portraying The Joker, which is another character in the Batman Universe.
3. I Love Bees – Halo 2 (video game)
The I Love Bees campaign which was launched with the initial marketing efforts of the video game Halo 2 is arguably one of the most intricate and detailed viral marketing campaigns to date. Structured as an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) the whole campaign gave no obvious mentions of any game.
It started when the first Halo 2 trailers quickly flashed a link to ILoveBees.com, a site about beekeeping that had apparently been hacked and taken over by someone who couldn’t be identified. The author, known as Dana, after finding that her site had been hacked, then created a blog asking people for help in order to get her website back.
The campaign generated a lot of attention, both from existing Halo fans, as well as new ones that were intrigued by the I Love Bees ARG. It was concluded when the players of the game were invited to a “Training Exercise“, which of course was simply a chance for those following the I Love Bees game to play Halo 2 before it was released. Participants were also given a DVD which among other things included a personal thank you message from one of the fictional characters created for the ARG.
4. Radiohead – In Rainbows (music)
After dropping hints about a new record even though they weren’t attached to a record label, Radiohead shocked the entire music industry when they in the beginning of October this year announced that they were giving away their album for free through their website. While downloading the album, fans were given the option to donate any sum they felt appropriate.
A month later, we can already state that this is one of the most effective marketing moves in the history of music. Even within two weeks, they had “sold” over 1.2 million albums, and on average each buyer had paid $8. That is almost $9.6 million in gross, all from a marketing campaign without any middle men, and practically no budget at all. What can we learn from Radiohead here? Think different, be radical, and people will take notice. Especially if you are already one of the most popular bands in the world.
Could Radiohead have earned more money from their album by releasing it the traditional way? Probably, I honestly don’t know what they earn these days from direct CD sales. The fact is however that most large bands earn the really big money through concert tours and merchandising, and I can assure you that Radiohead have, with this unexpected move, gained a lot of attention, trust and goodwill that can not be bought for money, and their alternative income streams will most certainly reflect that.
5. Hotmail (email service)
One of the first marketing efforts that took full advantage of the networking powers of the Internet was Hotmail, which I’m sure everyone reading this will already know about. In December 1996 they had 500,000 registered users, and less than a year later they had over 12,000,000 users! How did they accomplish such a feat? Apart from being one of the first and most accessible free email clients online, a single stroke a genius went a long way. Each email sent from a Hotmail account included a small, subtle ad for Hotmail, and as your user-base continues to grow into the millions, this means that you get all the free ads you will ever need to succeed.
As 1998 rolled by, it was announced that software giant Microsoft had acquired Hotmail for hundreds of millions of dollars, and even though it has been challenged numerous times since then, the service still stands today as one of the world wide web’s most popular free email services. Over twelve years later, that is no small feat in the fast-paced world of the Internet, and it goes to show just how effective and powerful viral marketing can be.
5 Trackbacks
13 Comments
November 5, 2007
That’s a nice list. I would add the introduction of Lexus automobile. Of course, there are others.
November 5, 2007
Actually, I meant Infiniti. It was very mysterious.
November 5, 2007
Most bands only make $1 to $2 per CD sold when they are tied to a label, so having only sold 1.2 million copies, they would only have made $1.2 – $2.4 million. So they did a good job here making almost $10 million by themselves. They should be congratulated and more bands should make the same move.
November 5, 2007
That is so cool about RadioHead! What a great band. what makes this so sweet is the music business loves to screw over the artist. RadioHead took it to a new level, they own the rights to there music and made way more money then if they where with a record company. I would rather spend the money knowing that it is going to the artist then have it end up in the pocket of some dick in a suit.
November 5, 2007
You cant call the batman one successful if the movie isn’t out yet..
November 5, 2007
Digital Nomad: Never heard of it, I’ll admit. I will check it out however, sounds interesting
Brian: There you go, the only ones that aren’t better off are the record companies – I can live with that!
Eric: I think there are many of us who feel the same way about that, and especially the attitude of the companies, not only towards fans but artists as well, has resulted in the widespread piracy we still see today.
Nar_Matteru: Just because the movie isn’t out yet, it doesn’t mean we can’t measure the success of the isolated campaign. As I mentioned, with a relatively low-profile campaign, they managed to bring the attention of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people to the movie. That’s success, even though the movie isn’t out yet!
November 5, 2007
I believe the NIN Year Zero viral campaign was much more successful than the In Rainbows. It had an ARG similar to Halo 2 and Batman 2, and gathered a lot of attention for many months. The album then hit #2 on the Billboard Top 200 and top spots in many other sub-charts that Billboard has.
November 5, 2007
Patrick: Yes, Nine Inch Nails’ campaign was certainly successful by any means. The reason it wasn’t included was because I didn’t want to overdo the article with too many examples, and also because I simply hadn’t as much insight into their campaign as I did with the ones I did cover.
But it most definitely is an article that deserves a mention, and hopefully one that I can cover in a future post!
November 5, 2007
You misunderstand. The goal of advertising is not to just reach people, but make them actually buy the product. They can reach as many people as they want, make as much hype as they want, but those people don’t actually end up buying tickets to see it, I wouldn’t consider it a success at all. Just because the people have been ‘reached’ doesn’t mean they will actually buy the product. As a matter of fact, that happens quite often.
November 7, 2007
It all depends on what goals you define for the campaign. Personally I think your perspective on this one is skewed. What I see as the main goal, and what I would imagine those who created the Dark Knight campaign had in mind as well, is to raise awareness for the movie. To say “Hey, look everybody, a new Batman movie is coming, in a year or so“.
They haven’t sold any tickets yet, but they’ve done a great job in making people aware of the fact that there’s a new movie on the way, and thus they’ve put themselves in a great position to actually sell tickets when the movie is out. A position they with more traditional marketing efforts they most likely would have ended up paying much more for.
Although I most certainly see your point of view, I can’t agree with your reasoning, because it’s all about defining a set of goals, and by reaching those goals coming one step closer to what it’s really all about. Whether or not they’ll be able to convert the attention they’ve garnered into sold tickets, well that’s a different discussion entirely, and one that would be premature to engage in today.
If my goal was to make money with this blog, attracting visitors to the blog would be one of the most important factors, even though it won’t directly result in any money. If 10,000 people visited the blog every day, I would still have done a decent job marketing it even if I don’t manage to convert those visitors into cold cash.
November 29, 2007
What about Cloverfield or the Lost Experience? J.J. Abrams is the Jimi Hendrix of viral marketing campaigns!
March 17, 2008
There is an interesting example of a successful viral capmaign in Romania. One of the main retailers, Altex, launched a commercial that was banned by the romanian FCC. It was based on an old joke about a monk that was thrown of a balcony. One of the characters then says: “I told you it was a priest… But you went on: Batman, Batman”. It was pretty funny and the email kept rolling for about 6 months.
May 20, 2008
Coca Cola Zero was the first on the list made after a study by Nouveau Rich University too. Coca Cola knew how to manage with people. They took advantage of the curious par of the human beings: they just gave a little for the beginning, made you wonder what’s up with “Zero†and what are they on about – people are always curious and like to have chats about mysteries and other things like this. That was manipulation… full of caffeine – a sweet one.
Leave a comment