The Blog on Branding

Having A Successful Viral Campaign Can Generate Buzz

The idea of viral marketing is simple. Create something, and then have it spread like wildfire. Or like a virus (Ohhhh, get it?). Either way, you need to understand the ways viral marketing works before you can effectively use it for your business.

“But it’s not as dangerous as it sounds!”




Let’s look at some examples of great viral marketing campaigns to get the full effect on how useful viral marketing really is.

Get Down with the Sickness

What was the biggest movie of 2008? If you guessed Hotel For Dogs, leave now. Get out. If you guessed The Dark Knight, then you, sir, have guessed correctly (show him what he’s won!!).

One of the reasons The Dark Knight was so immensely popular long before the movie even came out is because of the viral marketing campaign employed by Warner Bros. This viral marketing campaign was ENORMOUS. Absolutely gargantuan. Phenomenal. Ridiculously good. I’m running out of adjectives.

“Give me a minute.”




The viral marketing campaign for The Dark Knight began a full year (May 2007) before the movie was released with a website called www.ibelieveinharveydent.com (now vandalized by the villainous Joker). In its entirety, The Dark Knight’s viral campaign spanned 35 websites. Let me say that again. THIRTY-FIVE websites (all of them are now vandalized by The Joker as well).

The sites range from campaign ads, like the one seen above, to fictional cab companies, news stations and the like. Warner Bros. created the fictional city of Gotham in the real world and asked fans to participate in it. And it all started by people sharing the websites and information, and trying to unlock clues and secrets and participating in tasks to reveal pictures of the film and teasers and trailers and things like that one time where they asked people in specific cities to dress up like The Joker and….oh, sorry, I was getting away from myself there for a second. You get the picture.

The key to how a viral marketing campaign can become so successful is that half of the websites had nothing at all to do with the movie, or barely even mentioned it.

To successfully make a viral campaign work, it may not have to contain your product or company at all. A successful viral marketing campaign is the complete opposite of a traditional marketing campaign. The basic idea is to take everything that you know will work in a traditional marketing campaign and do the exact opposite. It doesn’t have to contain your product, maybe a brief shot of the product or a web address at the end, but other than that, let your imagination soar into the skies like an eagle.

Sharing is Caring

On the other end of the spectrum, and sticking with the movie motif I have going here, is the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie. The folks over there decided that they would launch a viral campaign as well, and if you can recall, didn’t turn out too well. What was the problem with their viral campaign? The small signs posted in 10 big cities were basically the entire campaign.

In a sense, it was a great way to get people to go, “Hey, what the heck is that?” But the major problem was its ability to be shared with others over a massive scale. People in those specific cities would MAYBE see them (they placed them in pretty hard-to-spot places), but it’s not like they could share them with their friends over the Internet or through other ways. And sharing is caring when it comes to viral marketing.

Your viral marketing campaign can be enormously effective through its ability to be shared with others. The content produced has to have the ability to catch people’s attention so much that they want to tell their friends about it, tell their Internet friends about and tell everyone they know about it.

Have you ever had a friend come up to you and say, “Hey, have you seen that [insert website, commercial, video, picture, etc.]? It’s awesome.” THAT’S viral marketing at its best. This is how The Dark Knight became so successful in its campaign. People were sharing the sites with each other, participating in tasks to reveal pictures and trailers, and the word-of-mouth spread….like a virus.

If you don’t think that viral marketing can work, then you’re being foolish. Look at how successful The Dark Knight became, and how much money it made, with some of that popularity being credited directly to the viral campaign it employed. If you’re still thinking, “I don’t want any part of this funny business! It’s not for me! Blah blah blah!” Then I have one question for you…

“Why so serious?”

Chris Levkulich Want content written for your Brand that shows up #1 on Search Engines and brings you new customers? Contact us.