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Informant
Viral Marketing is aimed at a public jaded by traditional advertising - where will it end?
By George Pendle
When
is an ad not an ad? When it has no product to sell. A man leaves his
house, gets into his Volkswagen Polo and drives to a busy café. Having
parked the car, he opens his jacket to reveal a bomb strapped to his
chest. His intentions are clear. However, when he detonates himself,
the blast is absorbed within the body of the car. The suicide bomber
dies as unscathed pedestrians walk calmly by. The Volkswagen logo
appears on the screen along with the slogan: Small but Tough.
With its play on contemporary fears this 20-second film appeared to be
one of the more successful examples of the recent craze for ‘viral
marketing’: advertisements too risqué for traditional media and spread
by word of mouth and forwarded e-mails. However within a week of its
appearance, and with complaints pouring in to the car manufacturer’s
head offices, Volkswagen admitted that it had not created the advert.
The film had been constructed by a little-known advertising firm hoping
to drum up interest in their skills. In this they had succeeded, but
more importantly they had seriously upped the ante in the
quasi-subversiveness that permeates much of viral marketing.
Inexpensive to produce and able to provide its viewers with an
ultimately false sense of exclusionary cool, viral marketing is aimed
at a public jaded by traditional advertising techniques. Designed to
transform the passive observer into an active participant, it does not
give you the hard sell; instead it sidles up to you and acts like a new
and interesting friend. As our interest is piqued by these skewed and
often mystifying ads, we find ourselves being enticed into
participation. If the Internet can be described as a giant human
consciousness, then viral marketing is the illusion of free will.
Take subservientchicken.com. It offers a webcam’s view of a man in a
chicken costume and suspenders standing in a nondescript living-room.
When you type a command onto the page, such as ‘make a sandwich’ or
‘pray’, the chicken-man obediently follows your commands. It spoofs the
Internet’s penchant for voyeuristic pornography sites, and makes the
viewer feel part of a strangely absurdist and clandestine club, despite
the fact that the website has gained over 400 million hits since its
launch last year. The strange thing is that, although commissioned by
Burger King, the company’s presence barely registers.
Indeed if one looks at the more convoluted types of viral marketing,
such as Sharp’s Dagobert Steinitz campaign, an interactive-fiction
multimedia romp, the product seems to recede ever further into the
backdrop. The Steinitz mystery concerns the myth surrounding a
shaman-esque anthropologist who hid three urns around the world and
left a set of cryptic clues as to their where-abouts. The campaign
stretches across three oblique television commercials, seven websites
and innumerable chat rooms, each of which imparts snippets of the
convoluted narrative. While the product, ‘a television’, appears on
some of the websites, it seems so at odds with the rest of the
Byzantine story that any mention of it can be quickly skimmed over.
Indeed, so involving is the storyline that it is almost as if the ad
has shaken off its product and escaped to live an independent life of
its own.
As the volume of viral marketing has increased, so have our
expectations. The bizarreness that used to be encountered quite freely
on the Internet is now under suspicion. Could that monkey urinating
into its own mouth be shilling for Listerine? Is that woman
masturbating a donkey on the books for Oil of Olay? With such grave
misgivings in the consumer’s mind the ad companies have been forced to
fly lower and lower under the radar to succeed. This has, in turn, led
to the worry of ‘ad creep’.
More and more forms of media – from mobile phones to video games – are
becoming embedded with advertisements. As a result, there is a genuine
anxiety that society will soon have no advertising because advertising
itself will become perfectly absorbed into everyday life. Advertising,
we are warned, will come to mimic the very ideas we use to define
ourselves. Indeed we won’t even think of it as advertising; we’ll think
of it as pure experience.
However, the fake Volkswagen ad suggests another, more benign, possibility. If the increasing dislocation between advertising and product continues, what if the product were itself to disappear? At the very least it could become one of many cultural signifiers in an otherwise independent work of art.
Even those ads that are, for the moment, umbilically linked to their
product stand a chance of transcending their origins. In years to come,
when Burger King and Sharp trade no more, the subservient chicken may
well be taken for a genuine fetish of the early 21st century. The long,
fake biography of Dagobert Steinitz, once set free from his advertising
shackles, could well intrude on an encyclopaedia of anthropology. As
time wipes clean the slate of intention, even less successful viral ads
may be granted immortality; for, once they are stripped of their
consumerist connotations, they can linger on like obscure totems, whose
reason for existence has become quite unknown.
