Via Lars: It seems the viral marketing company GoViral, who claim to be able to “seed” viral campaigns in 27 countries, rather botched an attempt to market Coca Cola Zero. A Swede using the user name “norge1” and an email address starting “norgeforum” posted links to two rather pathetic “fake” amateur videos. At FreakForum, one of the forums GoViral “seeded”, people figured out what was going on after he posted two links, and quickly enough they then found similar posts by the same user on nearly 50 other Norwegian forums.

Apart from the less than subtle “seeding”, the videos themselves are strikingly boring. In one video, the head trainer for the Norwegian soccer tema sits and watches TV or something while drinking coke (maybe I just don’t get this, being totally disinterested in football, but it seems extraordinarily boring and pointless?) and in the other a woman slaps her boyfriend repeatedly while trying on clothes and asking him whether they make her look fat. At the end of that video, the slogan for coke comes up. Go find the links by looking through the FreakForum posts – I don’t really feel like giving Coke more links and contributing to their campaign.

I’m not sure what the idea was, but it doesn’t look like a great way of marketing something to me.

2 thoughts on “botched viral marketing

  1. […] In their campaign for a new camera, Nikon appear to have chosen an almost opposite marketing strategy to Coca Cola’s botched viral marketing campaign. Instead of making a fake amateurish video and posting fifty links to it from Norwegian discussion boards, Nikon picked out a small number of eager, amateur photos already posting their photos to the web and sent them the new camera. The print ad shows some of the photos they took, with a tag line emphasising their amateur passion: “They shoot for photosites like Flickr. They shoot for family photo albums. They shoot because they’re passionate about taking pictures. What did they capture with the new 10.2 megapixel Nikon D80? See more of their jaw-dropping photos at stunningnikon.com/dslr“. At the website there are more photos, though not as many as I’d have expected based on the print ad – and there are little videos where four photographers explain how they take photos, and sometimes how much they like aspects of the D80. […]

  2. ThomasK

    Viral marketing is a powerful tool, but a large number of viral campaigns fall apart in the initial steps. I read a good article “A Case Study of a Viral Post“. One of the most important things is to get your viral campaing noticed on big sites/media in order for it to spread efficiently in ‘influential ripples’.

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