Hot On The Web - Viral Ad Campaigns

I love cars. My parents say that I could name cars when I was 3. I read all the blogs, go to the big car shows, have had a subscription to Car and Driver since I was in high school. There's always something interesting around the corner for me.

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That's why when I saw this on the web I took notice. It's a website for a new car called the 2011 Mediocrity. It's billed as being like every other sedan on the road today. It's designed not to stand out, and be just good enough. It comes in Medium Crumb and Brown Gravel.

And it's not real. It's built to show you how interesting a Subaru Legacy is. It's a send up of almost every campaign for a car that wants to show you how it stands out. And it's got your standard links to social networking websites so you can pass it along to your friends.

Time will only tell if it will be successful as a viral marketing campaign. As we know, a viral campaign is advertising that doesn't always depend on big budgets, but people who pass it along and start talking about it.




What are some campaigns that stand out?


- The TV show Lost had a number of different websites for aspects of the show; Sites for Oceanic Airlines, The Hanso Foundation, and others.

- BMW Films were a series of films with big names that featured BMWs in their story lines. One of the people who developed the concept was Joe Sweet from South Windsor.

- Cloverfield was one of the biggest January box office numbers ever and it's original trailers didn't even have the name of the film in the title.




What makes a good campaign?

Something that makes you feel like you are in a something special. You want to be part of the in-crowd. You also need to have high quality. I think you also meed to have it be an accurate representation. The BMW films were out standing films with top name talent, and it leads to another point, it makes you want to go back and experience it again.

Send us an email if there's a campaign that you thought was good or bad and we'll put together a list of interesting viral campaigns.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• advertising
• bmw
• subaru
• cloverfield