Dear Viral Marketer,
When you are creating a campaign designed to spread virally on the web make sure to follow Johnny Vulkan’s lead and create digital assets.
Johnny Vulkan of New York agency Anomaly designed an effective campaign for Keep a Child Alive. Check out the video here. Wearing a “Keep a Child Alive” T-shirt, Vulkan was first in line at the SoHo Apple Store on the day the new iPhone was released. In order to launch this campaign, he went to the where the media was—rather than inviting the media to come to him. And it worked. The media took pictures of the whole experience – and the campaign received millions of media impressions as a result. What made the campaign particularly effective is that Johnny Vulkan produced digital assets—pictures that the press and bloggers could use in telling the story—and made them widely available.
Creating digital assets like this is not entirely new. Many companies have press kits on their sites for this purpose. But to create assets made especially for a particular cause, and then make them available and highly visible on sites like Flickr and YouTube, is a new and effective spin.
The idea of creating viral videos has also been recently adopted by a number of companies. Blendtec, a company that makes powerful blenders mostly used commercially to make smoothies, created a series of videos called “Will it Blend?”. The short videos of a Blendtec guy blending everything from a light bulb, to a “movie night” (a can of Coke, some corn and a DVD), to even an iPhone (which was sad to watch), were showcased on a microsite made specifically for the series, but they were also put up on YouTube.
And if you’re not creating your own videos, follow Mentos’ lead (Coke took too long to come around!) and make sure to take advantage of user generated viral media using your product (check out the videos here).
So What?
Next time you launch a campaign designed to spread virally, makes sure you have digital assets in place. And go to where the story is.
