The Financial Times has a nice article today on viral marketing “Viral advertisers play with fire.”

They describe how blue-chip companies are increasingly trying to use viral marketing.
Examples they mention are Warner Music (Paris Hilton on YouTube), Unilever (Axe deodorant), Volkswagen, Virgin Money etc.

What those companies are doing is placing video clips or games onto prominent Internet sites hoping that a certain community is picking up on it and does the marketing job.

Of course this means playing with fire since it is often unpredictable if and how a viral marketing piece will be perceived and makes its way. E.g. it could well be that the bloggosphere picks up on it and makes fun of it which can make such a campaign ridiculous. Or the other way around is also possible that an obscure video clip shows up, like the one that showed a suicide bomber in a VW Polo blowing himself up while the explosion was contained within the car. Ironically while VW distanced itself from this of course it is said that the clip actually help to boost the VW brand.

So the conclusion is that while there is lots of potential, there is lots of risk and handling viral marketing activities requires the best support available. Needless to say that traditional marketing agencies will have an uphill battle to meet these requirements. It is also clear that only few blue-chips will dare to jump into this. Which is good for viral marketing since it would otherwise kill itself if suddenly everyone would figure out how to do it and again overload the medium. There are already 40k new video clips uploaded every day onto YouTube and 100million are watched which represents the "noise level" one has to overcome.