Creative Viral Marketing on the Web

Shave My Yeti is an example of the first category of fun sites I will review - fun sites with a serious purpose. These days, marketing is getting harder and harder. The ubiquity of marketing messages, the proliferation of marketing channels, and the emergence of new technologies with the corresponding decline of old ones are making the marketer's job much more difficult. An evolving marketing technique known as viral marketing attempts to utilize new channels, like the web, by intentionally influencing trends and fads. Malcom Gladwell's book The Tipping Point does an excellent job of analyzing the subtle factors that cause trends, fads and outbreaks of all kinds. Seth Godin applies many of these principles for marketers in books like Unleashing the Idea Virus and Purple Cow. Today's marketers are learning ways to influence such trends to their clients' advantage. If you can get thousands, even millions of people to send a link to a friend, you can reach people with your message in epidemic proportions, even without national television advertising budgets. Shave My Yeti is one such effort to get the Polartec brand out in front a young audience.

Another example of a fun site, produced by serious marketers is Subservient Chicken (www.subservientchicken.com), created by Burger King. The guy in the chicken outfit does whatever you type into the text box. He does it your way - get it? I know, go ahead - I'll wait...

BMW created a snowman jumping game to promote the BMW mini (www.miniusa.com/crm/jumpgame/snowman_jumpgame.jsp). I'm not very good at landing the game, unless the point is to make the snowman crash in interesting ways. I'm pretty good at that.

Creating a fun and compelling website is one way to promote a product or company in an incredibly cost effective way. Of course instigating a trend is not something that can be controlled. If you make a mistake it can't be stopped - a fact that leads us to our next category of fun sites.


Sometimes a website that was originally created purely for fun becomes so popular, that it gets adopted into a serious marketing campaign. That's what happened with the dreaded Quizno's Sponge Monkey campaign. Someone at the Martin Agency was crusin' the web and came across www.rathergood.com - a truly bizarre example of fun musical and animated creativity on the web. They hoped they could piggyback on the faddish popularity of the Sponge Monkey song We Like the Moon (www.rathergood.com/moon_song). This was a mistake. The site is popular mostly because of how bizarre it is. It has the same dark, compelling allure of a carnival side show. It may provoke your curiosity, but it doesn't make you want to eat a sandwich. Needless to say the campaign didn't improve Quizno's sales and the Martin agency was canned.   next >