When a Beverage Is Not Just a Beverage... It's Viral!

Every great shift in people's habits and thoughts requires the world around them to change as well - and this includes pitching them products as well. Gone are the days of simply persuading your audience to buy something because they need it. Now, people need to be able to laugh about commercials, share them with friends and download them from the internet. In other words, they need to willingly watch your commercial in order for the message to sink in.

This is how viral marketing was born. The name refers to those multimedia materials that become popular and thus spread from one user to another, using such available technologies as blogs, ad spaces, social networks, etc. In a nutshell, it is the marketing form of the 21st century. Not only does the sharing component increase the number of views an advertisement gets, it also allows the ad to bounce off people with similar interests and thus have better exposure to target audiences.

A good example of a viral marketing campaign is that of the hit HBO show True Blood. The name of the show refers to a fictional drink that the characters drink - synthetic blood that allows vampires to "come out of the coffin" and integrate with people without fear of biting them. The early advertisements for the show exploited the drink as if it was real - mixing fiction and the real world until people could not stand not knowing what Tru Blood was anymore.

The fake drink campaign was coupled with a real world campaign, where anonymous black envelopes sealed with red wax were sent off to horror movie bloggers. Inside, there were messages written in dead languages, such as Babylonian and Ugaritic. Needless to say, fans of the genre had a field day deciphering these messages. The most extreme version of the campaign was in the form of fake websites advertising concepts from the show as if they really existed - not just Tru Blood, but entire church groups and bars that figure prominently in the show. Real-life performances (people acting as if they were vampires stopping people on the street, telling them that they are coming back) and prequel comic books were also part of the campaign. It ultimately paid off - a strong audience of 1.5 million viewers tuned in for the first episode and True Blood soon became HBO's strongest show, its success comparable to that of The Sopranos and Sex and the City.

Is viral marketing here to stay? No reason for it not to. It seems the appropriate form of advertising for our day and age. Lately, the very idea of viral marketing has been exploited in order to sell more products. The advertisement for the product SmartWater, featuring actress Jennifer Aniston, is a prime example of an (3-minute!) ad that is not only to be actively sought out, but also shared with friends. The humorous ad spoofs many viral videos that have appeared online, while at the same time promoting the product. After all, whenever we share a music video on Facebook, we help those artists sell more albums. Why not do the same with bottled water?