The picture on the right is a basic outline on how a viral marketing E-mail
aims to work and how it can spread about from just one E-mail from one person to another.
A notable film which tries to get successful advertisement from using viral advertising is 2008 British Film 'Shifty' which was directed by Eran Creevy. The Viral advertising that it used was an E-mail which allowed someone to put a picture of a friend on a picture that is staged to look like it's from the police and has caught the person doing a drug deal. It is supposed to trick the reader into thinking it is from the police and they have been caught. 'Shifty' is about a drug deal so it is related to the film and advertises it well. Although, this viral advertisement later got banned, this gave the film more publicity, although primarily it was bad publicity, it advertised and made the film more well known to the public so in many ways it was good. Also, any publicity is good publicity is good a lot of the time for films.
Full feature Hollywood films don't just use advertisement on TVs and radios either. A lot of advertisement is now on the internet, mostly on the film's own website or YouTube. A good example of how big companies use this is 2008 film The Dark Knight directed by Christopher Nolan. On the Dark Knight's website, it uses space to advertise the blu-ray dvd and gives a link to a online shop where the public can buy the DVD. This is not an advertisement which we go from person to person in a domino effect like the 'Shifty' one will although it is a very simple way of giving an easy option to the public so they can purchase the film with little effort or stress. It also gives an option at the bottom of the screen saying 'Answer the Bat Signal'
This is the particular prank which Shifty used in an E-mail to the left which allowed users to put a picture of a friend on it. This created a wave of publicity through the internet from the public passing this on.
which is getting people to sign up for updates on the film so the producers and companies send E-mails to the public who signed up giving updates and information about the film and perhaps some offers for future films which the company produces. This may not be a massive thing or take a massive amount of effort, but the first part to getting fans and the public to see your music is to remind them about when the film is being released will get people interested and keep them interested until the release
date.
A large part of Viral ads is also videos which can be shared from one person to another. The most popular and well-known viral ad video is by 'Blend-tec'. This basically
features a man putting something, possibly a product new on the market or something expensive into a blender to 'see if it blends'. The screenshot on the right shows Blend-tec putting an Apple iPad in a blender. This is an effective viral ad campaign as the Apple iPad was released not far before this video was posted. Many people find these videos funny and share them to other people. People also post them to their social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. The Blend-tec campaign is a perfect example of how viral ads are designed to work as many people talk about the adverts and share them to their friends. It also has a clear target audience in each one of their videos, and as they have done hundreds of videos featuring different things and they all have different target audiences. The way it is campaigned is also a major reason why it makes it successful as a lot of the new products which come on the market, particularly electronic products, blend-tec do a new version of 'Will it Blend?' and post it on YouTube. This is the link to the iPad version of 'Will it Blend?': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAl28d6tbko
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