World’s Top 15 Viral Campaigns Part 2

How do viral campaigns become successful?

• Learn how "Year Zero" Project by NIN virally spread to 3.5 million people
• How BlendTec spent $100 dollars to reach out to 200,000 Youtube subscribers
• Find out how Dove Evolution video gathered more than 9 million online viewers worldwide

Do you aspire for your viral campaign to achieve worldwide success? Read on and learn from 3 of the world’s top viral campaigns.

1) “Year Zero” project

While record labels lament over their losses due to music piracy, artists like American rock band Nine Inch Nails (NIN) are coming up with innovative ways to inject fun and mystery into the music promotion game.
The elaborate campaign for NIN’s 2007 “Year Zero” album, carried out by digital marketing agency 42 Entertainment, is an excellent example of masking the line between an effective internet marketing campaign and pure entertainment.

The trail of clues started with a concert. White, bolded letters on the concert t-shirt spells out a website link that leads fans to the campaign’s site. The website designer craftily littered the site with hidden messages and imagery that are connected to the album. Fans also found USB Flash drives containing tracks from the upcoming album scattered in the bathrooms of the band’s concert shows. This “people-find-you” approach has become much more effective than spamming online networking sites with website links.

Not only is the campaign a marketing success, it is also a genius from a Search Engine Optimisation point-of-view. The website’s source contains mostly text content, which allows search engine to index it.

In the end, “Year Zero” project was a huge success. According to 42 Entertainment’s Year Zero Case Study Web site, approximately 3.5 million people were involved with the movement. Since then, the “Year Zero” campaign is seen as an ideal strategy to save the music industry from their business decline.

2) Will it blend?

How do you create a worldwide buzz over a blender that costs $400? Well, you show off how well the blender blends.

Then-new Marketing Director George Wright came up with the idea after watching his R&D team test the product toughness by blending up some wooden boards. He then invested $100 to blend other items and started shooting videos of the operation.

186 videos later, Blendtec’s retail sales shot up by 700 percent. The company also garnered up to 200,000 YouTube subscribers, with each video attracting hundreds of thousands of viewers over time. “Will it blend?” was also featured on highly-rated mainstream channels such as The Tonight Show, The Today Show and The Wall Street Journal, further heightening its popularity.

While the commotion over Blendtec’s effective campaign has now decreased slightly, the company continues to post videos on their popular YouTube channel and company website to build on their fanbase.

3) Dove Evolution

But not all viral campaigns are about showing off their products. You can carry out a very successful campaign without ever showing what your product does.

Dove Evolution is a 75-second video created by Ogilvy and uploaded on YouTube in 2006. It has been viewed over 9 million times since. Although the video was first featured during 2006 Super Bowl, hype over the commercial continued to be fuelled by bloggers due to its “believe in yourself” message. The commercial mainly focuses on associating their products to warm, happy feelings that one has when she feels confident and beautiful.

Dove’s approach to marketing is always about creating a movement that is bigger than its products, and this concept has been well-received so far. The video was featured on television shows such as The View, Ellen and Entertainment Tonight, with bloggers even making Dove Evolution one of the Top 15 most-linked-to videos among bloggers, according to blog-tracking service Technorati.

All 3 viral campaigns are effective in their own ways. As an internet marketing specialist or search engine marketing company, it’s important to adopt the right strategy to guarantee a successful viral marketing campaign.