Engineer Virality?

Are there "ingredients" for a campaign to go viral? Ingredients such as babies, animals, double rainbow, celebrities? Is there is a set formula? Evidence shows that 1 in 100 internet ads made - "the long tail" - become viral. 

Here is an example of an ad for a bottle-water company, which is a parody on "viral marketing" . Well, it has humor and "the ingredients". But, does it achieve its objective: would you share it with your friends? More importantly,
would you recall the product itself?

The feeling here is: you cannot force an ad to go viral by doing x,y and z. However, if you have the "ingredients" and a good story around it, your chances tend to be higher. For a product like bottled water - where you need high brand recall, low differentiation and low price sensitivity, this may work well.

Viral marketing is real and catching up in a big way. Research is beginning to figure out how emerging media can fundamentally shift how to reach out to "highly networked people”. The potential is huge. These are the facts - "Each day, 200 million people log on to Facebook. Each minute, 18 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. Each second, over 600 tweets go out." What would be the Obama 2012 campaign's main channel to reach out to young people? The obvious answer is - viral campaigns, significantly more than last time. 

There are a number of meaningful social causes, such as Embrace, that significantly depend on successful viral media campaigns. If these new channels are used to reach out to people, imagine the number of folks that can be engaged. In our Marketing using IT class at Rotman, one of the key take-aways, for me, has been -  how to leverage emerging media, coupled with high quality content, to get lasting domino effects.