Earlier this week, Tiger Woods made an unbelievable shot in the final round of the Masters and overnight Joseph Jaffe turned it into an ad for Nike earning him over 50,000 hits in a few days when he posted a 30-second and a 60-second version to his site.
In December 2004, George Masters’ iPod ad got a lot of press as the first ever homemade advertisement to ‘go viral’ and go big with 37,000 hits in just a few days. Masters made the ad and then posted it online to solicit feedback.. “Is this good?” he asked. He had no clue that his ad would become so popular or spread so quickly.
These two events represent a new wave of viral marketing, what I’m terming participatory viral marketing, in which individuals who are simply fans of a product or brand independently produce and post their own advertising spots which end up being incredibly popular. The video-editing software that comes with most home computers makes it possible for just about anyone to create professional quality ads. But it isn’t just the quality of the ads that makes them viral successes. Corporate marketing guys with far bigger budgets are falling all over themselves trying to figure out how to develop enough hype to make campaigns go viral by themselves. Yet overwhelmingly, the purchasing and placement of ads supporting a viral media campaign undercuts the viralness of the campaign itself; as soon as I see a two-headed dog on a billboard or at a bus stop I know it’s a top-down organized campaign by some big corporation (MTV2) that paid to put it there and I filter it out as more of the same old advertising noise and nonsense.
If homegrown ads are the message of participatory viral marketing, blogs are the medium. It’s not a coincidence that both the Tiger Woods and the iPod ads were posted to personal blogs. Seeing the ad on a personal blog establishes the ‘viral legitimacy’ of the ad: some guy like me made this because “hey, he just loves *insert brand or product name here*!” and he posted it to his personal site which someone sent me a link to or which I stumbled across. There is no connection with or involvement from the company who’s product or brand is represented. There is also no submission or approval process. People just happened to find this corner of the internet where the ad is posted. The whole process wreaks of word-of-mouth marketing, which is exactly the way viral media campaigns try to work.
The fact that consumers, who traditionally are passive receivers of advertising, will make their own ads supporting these products in their spare time for no reward other than the love of the product/brand signifies said product/brand is worth tremendous value at least in the hearts of those who make the ads. It’s only a matter of time before we see corporate marketers faking it, reproducing these homegrown viral marketing successes by posting ads to fake blogs, when they should really be focusing on ways to encourage participatory viral marketing, such as releasing high quality assets for more people to make more ads and publicly recognizing and rewarding past successes.