Viral…and Stealthy.

Viral marketing can be defined as a marketing technique that exploits a pre-existing social network to produce exponential brand awareness through a viral process similar to an epidemic. While that is something of a mouthful, a classic success story in viral marketing is Hotmail, which grew rapidly once e-mails from its users automatically generated an ad at the end of each message suggesting that the recipient sign up for the free service.

Viral marketing covers a variety of techniques from simple e-mail forwarding to word-of-mouth marketing, as well as sophisticated video and audio content, as the chart below illustrates.

Unlike other marketing techniques, viral marketing has the potential to have a very quick impact at a relatively low cost, and this is the key driver for marketers wishing to employ such techniques, according to MarketingSherpa.

The explosive growth of social networks and blogs have created the perfect environment for viral marketing, and with ubiquitous broadband adoption, high-quality, high-impact video content can spread far and wide.

One element of viral marketing that has caused some concern among advocacy groups is that many viral marketers purposely try to fool the viewer into thinking they are watching content that is something other than an ad — so-called “stealth advertising.” One classic example is the popular “Tea Partay” video circulating around YouTube at the moment.

You can see the video here.

In an informal survey, eMarketer analysts were asked whether they thought there was anything ethically wrong with this type of advertising. Here is a selection of responses:

“This is the way advertising is going: in your face, funny, outrageous, take no prisoners. It’s the price of admission for people, especially young people, to watch your ads — when they can skip any ad they want to. On a site like YouTube, particularly, I think this format works just fine. But saying that, I don’t condone ‘stealth’ marketing or any practice of deliberately deceiving consumers. It is important for advertisers to be clear about their identities. Trust, after all, is the most important thing for any brand. And you betray trust when you seek to sneak something by the consumer.”

“More and more, marketers are loosening the reins on their brand imagery and are letting consumers do what they will with their assets. In some cases they’re even providing them the raw materials to create ads on their own. This is the way advertising is going.”

“The more marketers use these social networks to send viral messages, the less open members will be to receiving the same viral message over and over again.”

“Here’s how this will play out: Before it even gets to the point of congressional tizzy over marketing to minors, YouTube members will start making the following comment on all marketing videos: ‘AD.’ It will just become a point of pride with some to be the first to state it’s an ad. This won’t stop the (legitimate) parental backlash, but it will inoculate many viewers against this type of viral marketing effort.”

“This particular vodka ad may not be ‘deceptive’ in the legal sense of the word as outlined by the FTC regulations, but is this not one small example in a growing trend of ‘stealth’ advertising, such as product placement in all forms of media, that is essentially undesirable?”

Courtesy of http://www.emarketer.com