Viral marketing was one of the key Internet industry buzzwords when I was an undergraduate (along with “sticky”, “portal” and “community”). It’s a pretty simple concept. You need a hook (a joke, a game, a free product or service) and a distribution mechanism (email, or a web form that emails a link to a web page). You seed this to a handful of Internet users, and hope they will forward it on to their friends (replicating and multiplying like a virus might). Only when it spreads has it “gone viral”. Hotmail’s email signature was an early poster boy for viral marketing. Every email sent through Hotmail went out with a sales pitch on the bottom of it “To get your FREE email account go to www.hotmail.com”: the service user benefited from a free email account, in return every email they sent made a sales pitch for Hotmail to their friends. As more people signed up for Hotmail, more people learned about Hotmail and more signed up for the service.
Sub-viral marketing appeared a little later. It’s the same general principle of viral marketing – a hook & a forwarding mechanism – but with a twist.
One of the staples of email forwarding culture (and now link sharing with friends through social media platforms) is the funny picture or video, and a key sub-genre is pop culture parody. Parody relies on brand owners to create messages, and for these to become part of the pop culture lexicon. The audience must understand the codes and conventions of a campaign to understand a parody of the same: the humour derives from subverting the original codes, denying us the expected outcome, or inverting the message.
Sub-viral campaigns shortcut this system: brands create fake pop-culture references to themselves, bypassing their consumers altogether. Ian Harris, writing in The Guardian in 2002, described sub-viral:
“Subviral marketing is a topsy-turvy trend that’s said to be being pioneered by brands including Budweiser, Ford, Levi’s and Mastercard. While traditional viral attachments feature short, slapstick video clips stamped with the brand’s logo and web address, subviral campaigns are carefully shot to seem like they were produced by an internet prankster.”
The sub-viral story seemed to disappear quite quickly, and I seldom hear people talk about them now. The sub-viral illusion relies on producer discretion: distancing one’s self from one’s “parodies”. Given the possibilities for sharing funny video clips, photos and links through various social media channels, it would be difficult to believe that this sharp practice doesn’t continue in 2009.
The inherent post-modernism of sub-viral imagery and video is worthy of the attention of media scholars: is it possible that by short-cutting the cultural practices of parody, brand owners can win attention for the original, non parodic, work? Do we understand the sub-viral’s original in terms of the parody, and does it therefore earn more attention for a campaign than it might normally have won? Does the audience stop to decode the original only because the parody demands this of them?
A further issue of debate here regards the encroachment of corporates into a space which is traditionally the reserve of alternative (non corporate) voices. Does the extension of corporate influence into an area of ideological opposition weaken the hand of anti-corporate activists?
#1 by Isla Watson at August 21st, 2010
viral marketing is the best but you have to think of a great idea that goes viral~`;