I did also appreciate Seth Godin’s original “Idea Virus”-era, but that was back in the early noughties. What has since been known as viral marketing is what we should all be doing. Only, the word viral, apart from being totally abused and misused, doesn’t make sense semantically. What we are doing is social marketing. It’s about trust. About using your trusted sources to sift out interesting stuff from the overflowing sea of information. It is not about uncontrollable viral outbreaks at all.
What’s even worse is the up-front use of the word viral. I’ve seen it in briefs and even agency names. One prime example is this horrible one:
The “Never Hide”-campaign by Ray Ban. They’ve made some really great content such as this film:
But now go to neverhide.com and see what happens. Go on. When you make it through the “choose language”-part, select films. Then look around the page for that horrible little word. It’s there. THEY are calling their films “viral” which is like saying: “You love this film enough to send it to all of your friends. We are not asking, we’re telling“. When you finally get to the films you can’t even share them, much less embed them anywhere. Great going guys. Couldn’t be viral even if you showed proof of Elvis being alive. Why didn’t you just embed the YouTube-clips?
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