This viral video which pits an old lady against a pompous jerk with no patience promotes an ethereal website for IKEA which challenges you to imagine odd combinations which, together, form useful home goods. Well sort of. We still don't know why anyone would need bamboo sticks to clean a house.
The site explains, "IKEA asked 28 designers to explore and experiment. To test new materials, techniques and new ways of working. But most of all, to have fun. They responded with a cavalcade of ingenious and madly innovative ideas for every home bold enough to be unconventional and the results can be seen throughout this website."
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To promote the release of FOX's The Family Guy DVD, Fuel Industries has created a Subservient Chicken-like site, called Stewie Live, featuring the character Stewie. As is usually the case with these command-based sites, Stewie, of course, burps, farts and has sex. Beyond that, Stewie reacts to 160 commands so far and the list will surely grow. To view an homage to the grand daddy of this genre, be sure to type in the word "chicken."
Called Parental Enlightenment Kit, this site is packed with ammunition and propaganda kids can use to convince their parents they really, really need a cell phone. With pressurePoint presentations, pre-written emails, stickers, iron-on t-shirt patches, a tear-inducing thank you card, wallpaper kids can put on their parent's computers, and other stuff, the site arms kids with all the tools they need for the snow job.
To insure skiers and boarders hit the slopes in droves this winter, American Skiing Company, parent to Killington, Sunday River, Sugarloaf and others, has launched Skier Intervention, a viral site with characters that dish out tough love in hopes people will get off their butts, head North, buy a season pass, make American Skiing Company rich and...oh yea...get people to take up the winter's best sporting and leisure activity. After all, skiing's not just about sliding down snow-covered hills but enjoying warm fires, cozy condos, beer and cheese fondue.
Unfortunately, there's a big problem with this viral. It can't be sent unless senders enter name, address, city, state, zip code and email. That's a lot to ask of someone just to pass along fun little viral. The site explains the information is needed to send various prizes, earned based on referrals to friends, such as season pass discounts, accommodations drawings and free lift tickets. While we can't fault a marketer for collecting leads, there's really no need to collect that information until after a person has actually won. To make matters worse, deep inside the privacy policy, which no one ever reads, it says the collected information may be used for offline direct mailings from ASC or "trusted partner companies." Just what we need - more crap in our mailbox. It seems this online viral is just a disguised direct marketing database-building mechanism for future offline marketing efforts.
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To promote Courir, a chain of French footwear stores, Paris agency Mask has created Everyday Sneakers, a spoof site which features the fictitious Takeshi Mushido, a Japanese business man who claims his company has dramatically increased productivity because all his employees wear sneakers to work. He even sings a hip-hop tune to get the point across. The site includes a Mushido interview with a stuffy French talk show host, Mushido's philosophy and even a book, Everyday Baskets which further illuminates Mushido's philosophies. It's all got just enough tongue and cheekiness to work.
Using the stereotypical motivational speaker, McDonald's, with this viral, is encouraging people to improve lunchtime blandness by helping them shatter boring lunchtime thoughts and replacing them with, of course, thoughts of McDonald's Toasted Deli Sandwiches.
To promote the upcoming Tim Burton movie, The Corpse Bride, Boston-based Pod Design has created not one but three online microsites. Adverblog points to Post Mortem where you can ask the dead questions Ouigi board-style; Bonymail where you can create messages from the dead to send to your friends; and Sept23 where you can view a scary video of a graveyard and a quick trailer for the movie. It's all nice, quick and simple - just the way we like our virals.
With A United States Supreme Court Justice slot open, the government can use all the help it can get filling the slot. Recruitment firm Accolo, the company behind the wildly popular Spicy Paris spoof, has placed a job listing on its site for the open position and has posted some initial interview questions for candidates to answer while applying. Questions, which cover the gamut of political ideology, range from asking where applicants would find justification for the right to privacy (My bathroom, Warren Burger's imagination, The Bill of Rights, My credit card company's database) to past experience with the federal legal system (Bailiff, Litigant, Juror, Judge, Attorney, Convicted felon) to which sitting judge the applicants beliefs align (Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, William Rehnquist, Stephen Breyer, Judge Judy).
The job description and application can be forwarded to a friend which should certainly give Bush a bit more choice than he'd other wise have pulling from his inner, old boy network.
To promote its new Motorola ROKR phone which adds 100 song 1Tunes capability, Cingular has launched a microsite, called Make Me Dance, which allows visitors to select a character, select a song, make it dance, then send it to a friend. It's a weak version of the Wedding Crasher's Trailer Crashers promotion which allowed visitors to place their their own image and images of their friends on the faces of characters in the movie trailer which could then be sent to friends. With Cingular's Make Me Dance, visitors can upload their own images but the resulting dance can not be sent to a friend. Odd. The whole thing's designed to convince people a cell phone that can hold a whopping 100 songs is somehow a viable option to the usual 3-5,000 song MP3 player. Hitachi, where are we when we need you?
After watching this viral promotion for a Dutch newspaper, we are confident in saying this is proof positive there's no rhyme nor reason for the success of viral campaigns. Several versions of this viral show a man so engrossed in reading his newspaper, he is oblivious to causing pedestrian havoc on the sidewalk and forcing garbage trucks to stop in their tracks. That's all he does. Oh wait. Now we get it. Just create something so weird that even Boing Boing doesn't know what it is, but will, of course, link to it, causing the necessary proliferation required of all successful viral endeavors.
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