Individual Research into Viral Adverts.

What is Viral Marketing?

 

Firstly, I’ll start off by asking “what is a viral advert?” Viral advertising refers to when a product, brand, service (etc.) is publicised via the internet or through word of mouth. The concept is that marketing itself starts off small by making a product known to a small number of individuals. These people then use pre-existing social networks (such as Facebook and Twitter) in order to inform others. This leads to an exponential growth of acknowledgement of said product. It can be used as free publicity as the product can easily 'advertise itself' across social media.  

Viral marketing is becoming more popular as the years go on as the internet is becoming more prominent every day, with more and more visitors turning on their computers, mobile phones and tablets. Proliferation plays a big role in viral marketing as there is more and more technologies being made and used daily. A lot of people are now buying games consoles to watch films on as they now allow apps such as Netflix as well as being able to play games, meaning it’s the best of both worlds for the consumer. Netflix is also available on laptops and mobile phones via the downloadable app meaning viewing films is 10x easier than it was 10 years ago… which is why viral marketing is being more popular with production companies. 

A great example of a modern day viral ad is the marketing campaign for The Dark Knight Rises (2012). This campaign features the use of the films social media pages as they allow for their audience to interact with their marketing to increase hype surrounding the film. I decided to take it upon myself to make Charlotte the social media manager behind our film company ‘Hadelliotte’ as I told her to make a Facebook page to advertise our film on. The response was positive and was better than I had expected as we managed to gain a small audience overnight with many of our likes coming only a few hours after the page was made. Charlotte decided to release the teaser poster and the teaser trailers which I created to generate some hype behind the film as we took inspiration from The Dark Knight Rises as they generated a lot of hype overnight, just like we tried to do… Just on a lot smaller scale. 

 

The Dark Knight Rises decided to graffiti spray painted bats around the globe and had their twitter follows get out of their houses to snap pictures of them and upload them onto twitter with the hashtag #TDKR07202012, which managed to become trending meaning people who weren’t even fans of Batman saw it, allowing for them to advertise to a new demographic as well as targeting their original target audience. For every picture which was uploaded with the hashtag, a frame from the trailer was uploaded to their website making their fans get involved. The campaign also got people out of their houses and outside, benefitting to peoples physical health. The trailer was unlocked in under 23 hours, proving the hype was real for The Dark Knight Rises.