Marketing Logic

However, it was the doomed from the start, says Jackie Huba at Church of the Customer.  Anytime you give the public the tools to create something for themselves and have it displayed at that company’s website, you are asking for trouble.

Chevy was asking for people to take a variety of clips, music and create their own commercial.  People could add graphics and slogans, but the campaign was taken over by eco-groups building commercials that became anti-GM and anti-SUV.  All of a sudden, GM had some cleaning up to do . . .

Somehow, it seems as though big corporations and ad agencies are always trying to create the next big viral campaign instead of letting it happen.  When a viral campaign is forced, it backfires, or usually, just sputters out, as people can tell when it’s faked.  For example, take a look at The Captain’s Blog.  This was supposed to be a blog started by Captain Morgan to sell rum.  Unfortunately, there are only 5 weeks of posts and the last one is over a year old.

If you want to see viral in action, go to YouTube.com (which is an example of viral in itself) and do a search for “brokeback parody.”  There are hundreds of Brokeback mountain trailer spoofs.  Using the music and lines from the original such as “they forgot about ‘love’” in the spoofs, users have created Brokeback to the Future, Brokeback Trek, Brokeback Island (Lost), Lord of the Brokeback (LOTR), Brokeback Dumb and Dumber, Brokeback Kid (Karate Kid), Brokeback About Nothing (Seinfeld), and my personal favorite, Brokeback Stooges.  There are hundreds of self created videos and many using clips from other movies and shows to spoof this trailer.

No contest, no prizes, just for fun.