The Perils of Viral Video Marketing Works

A successful video viral that captures people imagination can result in enormous commercial benefits, for even the smallest business or organisation. Take Blendtec. Their delightfully engrossing viral video series “Will It Blend?” did wonders for the manufacturer’s brand awareness and led directly to an increase the sales. There are however, a number of commercial marketing videos that have “gone viral” for completely the wrong the reasons, damaging well known brands.

Johnson & Johnson released this video to coincide with “International Baby Wearing Month” to promote Motrin pain relief capsules to mum’s suffering ache and pains, but the video also insinuated that many carry their baby’s in slings or pouches as fashion accessories. This implication, real or perceived, led to hundred’s of mums around the world flooding messages boards, social networks and blogs with their thoughts about the pharmaceutical giant. Spoof responses were posted to Youtube and angry mothers threatened boycotts. This was a huge PR disaster for the Motrin brand that seriously challenged the old adage - no such thing as bad publicity. They were ultimately forced to take the ads down and apologise. Here's just one of the re-edited responses;

Hong Kong’s Langham Hotel also fell victim to a very badly misguided viral video campaign. They created a series of three videos entitled “Visiting Hong Kong Is A Big Deal” which featured supposed tourists (actors) having an unpleasant time out-and-about in Hong Kong, returning the sanctuary of the lovely hotel, away from the locals and nasty food. The videos prompted almost instantaneous outrage online from hundreds of mainly Hong Kong based bloggers who found the series offensive. The videos were take down very quickly, but according to one of the actors her scenes “involved acting as a tourist new to Hong Kong, expressing distaste at being served chicken’s feet in a local “dai pai dong”, then eating a spring roll in the restaurant at the Eaton Hotel (part of the Langham group)”. It’s no wonder really then that this video also went “viral” for the wrong reasons. This is part of the statement Langham Hotels reportedly released in the aftermath;

 “While we’re pleased that we’ve generated discussion in the forums with the videos we’ve created, we were disappointed that the satirical tone of the videos was misunderstood in some circles. As a result of the potential to magnify the tone in a direction that was not intended, we have decided not to continue with this campaign.”

Sony’s 2006 viral video campaign didn’t cause damage to Sony’s brand because it was misguided … the problem here was deception. In an attempt to sell their Playstation Portable (PSP), their hired viral marketing “specialists” in Zipatoni to produce a fake blog written by two imaginary teenagers, which featured a rap video about how much they wanted their parents to buy them Sony’s struggling product for Christmas. A shrewd blogger soon worked out it was fake and the backlash forced Sony to take the ad down. The dishonesty didn’t put the company out of business, but it certainly did a lot of damage to the Sony brand.

The right viral marketing video can deliver incredible benefits for a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising, but they can also backfire, so proceed with caution.