Old School Viral Marketing: Spark your Word of Mouth

Sometimes funny is the fastest spark to make your ideas go viral.  A simple way to get talk going is to create something entertaining. 

Be entertaining:

Create something that will make your best customer and Brand Lovers smile. This tactic while simple really does work. 

Office Max has captured the holidays funny bone with Elf Yourself . This is not just fun and games, Office Max’s Elf Yourself marketing campaign attracted 193 million visitors and was the best viral campaign in the history of the Web. More than 123 million “elves” were created in just SIX weeks (you’ll find many pictures of them on Flickr, where users submitted them for all to see).  

Here is a little viral campaign that my buddies Gaby, Reggie, Charlie and I kicked off back in the days (1998). We created the characters (that was fun!) and the animation using flash. We where so amazed to receive thousands of letters and emails from all over the world. We also received more proposals for work that we could handle in our little animation (4-d Marketing) studio. MacroMedia called us because they where impressed that we where able to sync the mouth movements with the music. We did not use the term viral marketing then but we knew our idea had caught fire! 

Eventually the Combo Number 5 trend died down for us, but I recently found our original flash transformed into a YouTube Video! What amazed me more was that people are still loving it and talking about it even after all these years!