Whoring the Headlines

A new category: Viral Marketing

This series will feature, critique and solicit comments on various viral marketing campaigns I come across. Lately, I’ve become more and more intrigued about how companies and organizations use the technique and the metrics used to determine the campaigns’ successes and failures.

VS.

The first two campaign in this series are BMW’s “The Ramp” and Paltalk’s (video chat community) campaign that allows people to integrate a name into a video.

The latter is pretty creative and apparently a big hit. I personally sent it to about a dozen of my friends. BMW’s “Mockumentary” is unique, but it’s 30 minutes. The Wall Street Journal wrote a pretty good story about BMW’s campaign, as well as the risks involved when launching a campaign that essentially misleads target audiences.

As a viral marketing campaign, I think Paltalk’s is more effective because it integrates people into the process. Although I don’t necessarily think that that component will make or break a campaign, it doesn’t hurt to have people involved to increase interest and prompt the campaign’s distribution, which is the ultimate goal of such a campaign.

If you want to send out Paltalk’s campaign and trick your friends, you can either watch the link above — the form will appear at the end — or just click here