Some of the Best Viral Video Marketing Ever

Written by Jeffrey Sison Sunday, 30 January 2011 20:01

We've all heard about viral video marketing and how a successful campaign can boost a product into super stardom virtually overnight. For me, the best way to learn about how to create a good viral video marketing campaign is to actually look at the successful ones and build from there. Here is a list of some of the more popular viral video marketing campaigns on the net and a brief description of each.

We've all heard about viral video marketing and how a successful campaign can boost a product into super stardom virtually overnight. For me, the best way to learn about how to create a good viral video marketing campaign is to actually look at the successful ones and build from there. Here is a list of some of the more popular viral video marketing campaigns on the net and a brief description of each.

1. The Cadbury Gorilla - This was an ad for TV that featured a gorilla playing the drums, nothing special right? The reason why this video became really popular was the way it was presented, it started off really dramatic and ended quite literally with a rousing drum solo from the gorilla. Internet users found this really interesting and it got passed over and over again until millions of people saw it virtually overnight.

2. Guitar Canon - This video shows how something simple can be really amazing in terms of viral video marketing. It shows a guy playing Canon in D on a guitar (quite amazingly) and then sticking a link after the video saying that he learned to play that from a certain company. Think about it, if only a fraction of a percentage of the 45 million people that viewed his video went to that site to learn guitar lessons then it would have netted millions for the company with just a simple viral video.

3. Blair Witch Project - This movie was shot with a shoestring budget of less than $25,000 or so. With the brilliant use of viral marketing, the buzz was so much that people were talking about the movie before and after it was released do to speculations and discussions. The result of this campaign was worldwide sales of over $250,000,000 dollars, not bad for a very low-budget movie eh?

4. NASCAR Theft - Nothing is harder to do than promote something really boring like a site offering tax services. The advertising team took this as a challenge and staged a theft of an actual NASCAR vehicle during a live racing event (of course they co-branded and partly owned the car) which got everyone talking. This got them free TV airtime of almost a million dollars and the brand recognition that came with it when it came to tax time.

5.The Subservient Chicken - In homage to sex chat webcams, Burger King launched a campaign using a person in a chicken suit doing stuff in front of a webcam. A lot of people instantly recognized tha parody that they were portraying. This really hit home the concept of "Have it your way" when it came to Burger King.

Now these are just a few of the really successful viral video marketing campaigns out there. What do all of them have in common? They didn't actively try to sell anything, they captured the attention of people and gained recognition.

This recognition is basically the goal of viral video marketing. To let people know that you exist. Once they know who you are, then the rest is quite easy to do.