Top 9 viral marketing success stories of the decade

The success of a campaign can be measured with the help of the stats which shows how viral it spreads from its targeted audience. I have compiled few of the most famous campaigns in the last 2 decades which have successfully got themselves indexed as case studies. Most of these campaigns were part of the past and these methods show no significance in the current web 2.0 era, but still the principles they have used are just amazing and will be followed for many years ahead.

You cannot take any blogging tips or traffic generation tips from this post as this is just for your general knowledge and moreover I wanted to post something entertaining for a change rather than our normal blogging tips posts. I hope you take the maximum out of this post and I’ll try to get you as involved as possible.

Viral marketing as the name tells you is a technique through which you spread your company’s name like a virus from person to person, this kind of marketing existed even during the times of Henry Ford, I must say that this was the only source of marketing during the olden times, its not very clear how it was washed away, but I feel that corporations got obsessed with slow movement of such campaigns and preferred to opt to the then brand new paid advertising in newspapers and televisions. Now when communication is faster than ever before and with the help of tweets, facebook, emails and chat many first generation firms came back to use this method.

Hotmail

We may have forgotten about a lot of things of the past, but never our first email ID. I don’t know about you guys but my first mail id when I was six was at Hotmail, which happened to be one of the most trending topics in the world. Today if you see the design they had back then I’m sure most of you would puke, but when I first saw it I felt that it was the most exciting things in the world.

Leave that aside, for now one thing that matters is how did Hotmail build a user base of 12,000,000 in just a year before being acquired by Microsoft. First thing is that they had a particular advantage as they were one of the first to provide free email services to the masses, so they were pretty popular on televisions, newspapers and other communication channels of the twentieth century, but that was not enough to gain over 12,000,000 users.

So the initial popularity of the service successfully gave it around 500,000 users in the first year, and so the reason for its 500% growth rate in a year was a simple strategy which would take others years to think about. What hotmail did was put a small signature below all outgoing mails which recommended the users in the receiving end to sign up for hotmail. This was a very simple tactic but was very successful.

They did not need any high cost banner advertising or a television commercial and the only thing this costed them was a few pennies as bandwidth. One lesson we can learn here is viral marketing works only if you have an existing audience in place, you cannot take your business or blog viral if you lack the initial users or customers. Hotmail did it well, they successful got their first few users and triggered a viral chain using them.

Blair witch

I wasn’t very knowledgeable during the release of this film, but if you were pretty aware of the happenings in the movie world I’m sure you would have heard of Blair Witch which was released in 1999 ( but still its part of this decade) and the buzz it caused all over the world just days before its release. Blair witch wasn’t a big budget movie such as Avatar as it had just $300,000 and neither did it involve anyone like Johnny Depp in it. So they didn’t have money for marketing, they didn’t any good actors either, but still how did the move gross over $250 million.

The secret has already been revealed, but still not many people know about it even today. For any horror movie success depends on how realistic the movie actually is, and thats what the producers did to get attention towards their movies. The first thing they did was make up a fake story calling it the history behind their move which is that 3 young film-makers died while making this movie and 3 years later they got the details of the movie and went forward to recreate it, after making up this story and practicing it in their own words they targeted many shows related to movies as well as supernatural entities and over night their movie became the word of the season and went ahead to have the largest budget is to earnings ratio in the history of hollywood. (click here to see the video)

So if you can see this example you’ll know that at times an existing audience isn’t very necessary, all you need is something which is of great quality and a bit of creativity, although I call this as a rare chance which only a few successfully implement.

Vodafone ZooZoo ads

If your an Indian I’m sure you’ll never miss a laugh at the Vodafone ZooZoo ads which mainly appear during the IPL season. The advertisements are really attractive it would capture the attention of every individual. Initially everyone thought that the advertisements were pure animation, but it was later known that kids enacted the whole thing while wearing a mask.

Unlike the other two above this wasn’t a free cost campaign, but it successfully triggered a viral chain. After launching the campaign Vodafone’s subscription rates increased by almost 30% each quarter and moreover they made good amount of money selling their ZooZoo goodies.

Ofcourse this took millions of dollars as they had bid for heavy viewership during the infamous Indian Premier League, but they’ve successfully got more than they had asked for. So you see this clears a major mis-understanding among people who think viral marketing is free, at many circumstances it is free, but it will be faster and much easier if its paid.

Subservient chicken for Burger King

Burger king introduced their subservient chicken in 2004, but it proved to be of no use because they didn’t promote their character well and moreover they never got time to build a proper authority to their character mainly because they were in a hurry to keep up with competition.

After one year they decided to launch a mini site, just because everyone else in the industry had theirs, but no one could imagine that Burger King’s mini site would get 400 million hits in a year. This is without any advertisement promoting it, without any major online campaign as well, so how did Burger King generate such high amounts of traffic without using any promotional and what effect did this have on its brand?

Being very straight forward I have no idea on what effect it had on their brand, but their profits and fame continuously rose year after year from that time onwards. The reason their was so much buzz about this is because when you enter their mini site you’ll see a video which showcases a chicken which is doing various funny acts, I suppose it was real fun to watch that. They had an option called tell a friend and I think thats something which took this ad really viral.

Gizmodo

This was a viral marketing story just 2 months ago and this made it for the entire web and became a big buzz overnight. Gizmodo is a famous site which belongs to Gawker Media, but still it wasn’t very notable as it rarely made it mainstream media and its visitors were constant from years without much growth, but suddenly their is something big that takes place and the top executives of Gizmodo will see their lives up-side down and the other moment their site will be flooded with millions of people. Lets see how they did it and how successful they are,

I guess most of you have heard of Apple’s next Iphone and according to Gizmodo one of their employees found it in a bar and as usual they made a big post and immediately it went all over web and they were featured on big channels such as CNN and BBC and now I’m sure you can imagine what kind of fame they have got due to this.

But this strategy of theirs was pretty expensive for the Gawker Media as the editors’ house was raided and they were almost about to be sued by Apple. Well for a business money is what matters most and they have got fame without spending any money and I’m they have found a few sponsors due to this, so that is why many bloggers recommend that you try your best to be controversial.

My name is khan – SRK and Shiva Sena conflict

In India conflicts about celebrities and politicians is something that always makes the news and without the public knowing their are a lot of people gaining fame and money behind the scenes with the help of public sentiments. 5 months ago this formula was used to its highest extent, one of India’s most popular actors Shah Rukh Khan had a conflict with an infamous political party named the Shiva Sena which believed in discrimination of non-marathi’s in the Maharashtra state. Taking advantage of this SRK started to openly criticize the Shiva Sena and its members  and very soon he became a national hero.

This happened just weeks before the release of Shah Rukh Khan’s new movie named My name is Khan which which happens to be a movie related to social crimes and religious hatred. That was worth a watch but I could never imagine that this movie would gross more than $100 million. Just one day after the launch the Shiva Sena refused to give access to release the movie in multiplexes in and out of Mumbai, and then the person who refused to apologize all this time went ahead and apologized to the party members and in a few hours they looked more like best pals.

I had a doubt on Shah Rukh Khan from the beginning, this made me a bit more suspicious on him and recently one of my friends who is a political blogger told me about this, so I decided to include this in my list. Not everyone know about this and this is just what I think has happened, Shah Rukh Khan used this method to improve his reputation among the people and then he profited from it by playing around with the public’s sentiments.

This can be a very profitable technique of viral marketing often used to promote brands. You may have heard big companies donating to charity and stuff, the reason behind the scene is actually brand promotion nothing else.  You can do this in an ethical manner as I strictly believe that you must value your community more than anything else.

Twitter

When it comes to viral marketing how the hell could we forget Twitter which I’d like to call the most popular social tool for this decade. When I first created my Twitter account I was like who the hell would want to use this service, but I was in a bit of shock that it went so popular. Even today not many people like using Twitter, then how did Twitter get so famous all of a sudden? Not many people know about this, but I’ve tried my best to analyze it and I guess I’m right.

Even today the media isn’t really like believe what you see, their are a lot of things happening behind the screens of the news channel your watching. If all of the major news channels announce something together then the publics opinion makes no difference in the society, maybe due to the birth and influence of social media news is getting accurate, but it still takes a lot of time.

Twitter used a similar strategy when they got started and maybe this what pushed their future growth. According to my research they even paid a few celebrities to join and make controversial tweets. You see Twitter isn’t going get a chance to bribe some celebrity to write something offensive, so they just monitor them and try to make their tweets famous by pushing them towards mainstream media.

This is a strategy which is used by many politicians and businessmen and till now they have found quiet a success, but this takes more money than any mainstream advertisement and moreover the effects of such campaigns are fading off slowing due to increasing penetration of social media, due to which the public can easily promote their opinions.

The Million dollar homepage

Alex Tew originally started this to raise funds for his college fees, but the outcome was such that he’d drop his plans to study and go out sailing with his private boat. The idea was really good, so thats something which was like adding fuel to the fire caused by his viral marketing campaign.

The first thing he did after setting up his blog was borrowed some money from his friends and sent a paid press release which was pretty expensive. Due to the uniqueness of his idea it was immediately picked up by big channels such as BBC and CNN and also a few online publications. This gave him instant popularity and he started to sell hundreds of pixels each day and very soon it touched one million.

After this many people started such services but only a few succeeded. The moral if you really want to make money online or create a successful viral campaign all you need is a bit of creativity. Alex’s idea was made for success as he took the path never traveled before. If I’m not wrong he is probably enjoying life generating passive income.

The Dark Knight

Keeping in the same vein as “Cloverfield,” “The Dark Knight” took a similar approach in it’s viral efforts. One of the first promotional stunts involved a fake website for Harvey Dent’s (one of the main characters in the film) fictional campaign for District Attorney. Posters stating, “I Believe in Harvey Dent” were shareable and able to be emailed to friends. Once the other person received the email, the poster would slowly change to reveal the image of The Joker. Once the image was revealed, The Joker’s face was quickly replaced by the text, “see you in December.” Other websites attached to the film allowed for users to vote for various public offices throughout Gotham. More viral elements included a website devoted to the fictional newspaper “The Gotham Times” (which led to numerous other website that revealed info about the film) and the launching of WhySoSerious.com which revealed more images of The Joker as well as the first teaser trailer.

Such elements combined with the stellar reviews of the film and breathtaking performance of the late Heath Ledger helped the film to gross more than $1 billion dollars worldwide.

On to our readers

I have tried my best to compile the most famous campaigns for this decade, many of these publicity stunts aren’t even known to general public, so it took me a hell lot of research to create this post. So I’m hoping that you take the maximum out of this and hope your well entertained as well. To keep with future posts of such sort please do subscribe to our feeds and follow me on Twitter.

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