You've been infected, now infect someone else

Viral Marketing is a radical form of marketing and publicizing a brand or product through unorthodox means of publicity. This new form of marketing has taken the internet by storm especially through the usage of social-networks. The term viral marketing stems from the way viruses multiply and replicate exponentially. The way messages are spread from one person to another is also alike a person infected with a virus, who then becomes contagious and infects others. Viral marketing methods can be extremely effective in generating a lot of attention and hype on internet communities without needing huge budgets according to Newsweek’s Jared Sandberg (1999).

One example of effective viral marketing is through the publicizing of the movie Cloverfield. The marketing team chose an approach that embodied the theory of multimodality in which several forms of media were used to generate hype in several communities. For example, movie trailers that did not mention the movie title and only a release date were posted on video-hosting sites such as YouTube. Various profiles of characters in the film were also made on social-networking site, MySpace. In addition to those, pictures of photographs of the decimated view of Manhattan where the film is based was also released to further fuel speculation and discussion of the movie.
Source: Wikipedia.org

The trailer for the movie Cloverfield.

Walsh (2006, p. 24) states that multimodal texts are “those texts that have more than one ‘mode’, so that meaning is communicated through a synchronisation of modes”. Viral marketing methods apply this theory to their operations by weaving together marketing schemes to create a unified but subtle and unassuming marketing push through the internet. Blogs and profiles on social-networking sites use mainly text, video-hosting sites utilize audio and video and images are spread through photo-sharing sites. With the proliferation of the web, these forms can also come together in a single site sometimes.

In my opinion, viral marketing represents the future of marketing on the internet. In an age where users are connected through colossal social networks where active exchange of information is present, what more cost effective way is there to gain publicity than having millions of people on these social networks do it for you? Tim Padgett of Time Magazine calls it advertising’s future and I have to agree and eagerly anticipate being involved in a new product’s marketing campaign.

References

Walsh, M 2006, ‘The ‘textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 24-37.

Padgett, T, 2004, What’s Next After That Odd Chicken?, Time Magazine, viewed 12th November 2008
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,995343,00.html

Sandberg, J, 1999, The Friendly Virus, Newsweek, viewed 12th November 2008
http://www.newsweek.com/id/88021>

Stern, L, 2005, Is It Buzz or Merely The Noise of a Pest?, Newsweek, viewed 12th November 2008
http://www.newsweek.com/id/49644

Cloverfield Entry, Wikipedia, viewed 12th November 2008
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloverfield