technoculture203-09

During the lecture on Digital Capitalism, the idea of viral marketing as a means of control and social media caught my attention. In the lecture, I recall Luke bringing up the idea that viral marketing might not be such a good thing, because it denies user their rationality, in that consumers should be able to discern what is good and bad for themselves and not just listen to other people’s interests. Viral marketing is hailed as good because if the idea and the execution is good than it can be passed on through people and not force fed to the general public. However if it is bad than people complain that it is insulting to their intelligence to try and market to them in that way. I would like to get to the bottom of what people like and dislike about viral marketing through two examples.

According to urlesque.com, maninsuit.com was a website which showed a video of an attractive blond Australian who had apparently met a man at a café and wanted to find him again using the jacket he had accidentally left behind. It was soon revealed as a fake. The followers were livid when they discovered that it was all an add for the jacket and that the woman in the video was a hired actress. The problem is that it was too good of a fake, and people don’t like to find out that what they thought to be true was actually a lie. Viral marketing often makes use of “real” situations caught on camera, but at the end of the day people don’t like to be misled.

The second viral marketing campaign was a well known called whysoserious.com for The Dark Knight. It garnered lots of media, especially in what the company behind it all, 42 Entertainment, called its “360” interactive game where over 10 million people all over the globe worked together to solve clues as part of the Joker’s gang. This was hailed as an entirely new way of dealing with movies, and has been copied for recent films. What made this campaign so successful was that people knew from the start that it was fictional, but they were able to suspend their disbelief and join the millions of people already invested in discovering the clues. So it seems that viral marketing finds success not when it tries to simulate reality, but instead when it takes its product into the real world an allows people to interact with it in their own way. People don’t necessarily want to be pandered to, but they are willing to join in a craze if it excited them.