Viral Marketing—Is That a Good Thing?

[jmiller]

Anheuser-Busch announced Thursday that it would be expanding its advertising efforts to include “viral marketing,” enlisting the aid of JibJab phenom brothers Gregg and Evan Spiridellis.

The Spiridellis brothers created the JibJab Media Inc. animated spoof “This Land,” a hard-hitting comedy romp aimed at George W. Bush’s cowboy-style intelligence and John Kerry’s waffling masculinity. The cartoon was a smash success and spread like a virus from viewer to viewer, the popularity of which made the Today Show.

Enter the latest form of online marketing—the viral type. Viral marketing is creating an ad on a website that is so entertaining, that net surfers will pass it around to each other willingly. If the branding is successful, then the cost of the medium goes down tremendously.
"If you already have your Web site up and running, the media is free,"says Bob Lachky, Anheuser-Busch brand management vice president.
Anheuser-Busch has recently reported a drop in earnings speculated to be because of the rising popularity of cocktail drinks and of rival Miller. JibJab was signed in an effort to beef up creative advertising methods to appeal to a younger audience.

“One of the benefits of the Internet is that we can be slightly more irreverent than we can on television,” Greg Spiridellis said.

[ManagedLinks]

If by "viral Marketing" you mean "word of mouth" then yes its good, its been around since man first learned a spoken language.

But as a web marketer looking at viral marketing programs. the story is very different.

This is MLM, Multi level marketing by another name, thats all.

I have taken an interest in viral marketing, and it is only useful if you want to market to other webmasters. but even then they don't want your product. they want you to buy/join theirs, so the success rate is low.

That has been my experiance anyway.

Promote "word of mouth" get your customers to talk about your product off the internet.