Viral Loop

by ADAM L PENENBERG

  Naturally this type of viral humor, known as a joke cycle, was not new. In the United States they date back to at least the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when a series of “Little Willie” jokes were all the rage.

  Little Willie with his thirst for gore.

  Nailed his mommy’s baby to the door.

  Following World War II, there were Holocaust jokes, Jesus jokes, and in the 1950s, bizarre family jokes:

  Q. Mama, why is Daddy’s face pale?

  A. Shut up and keep digging.

  Other joke cycles made fun of ethnic groups—Polish people and the Irish, among others. Helen Keller jokes poked fun at blindness and deafness. In the 1960s dead-baby jokes were popular, and the 1970s brought “Yo, Mama” cracks.

  As Simons noted in an article titled “The NASA Joke Cycle: The Astronauts and the Teacher,” published in Western Folklore seven months after the calamity, the jokes aimed to offend in two respects: they attacked targets usually viewed as immune from crass commentary, and they were often gross or violent. The difference between these cycles of mirth, however, and the one involving the Challenger space shuttle was the speed with which it traveled. Little Willie jokes took decades to infiltrate large tracts of the country. The others were also slowed by predominantly face-to-face contact. But the Challenger disaster spawned almost instantaneous jocularity across all fifty states within weeks. It even took hold abroad—in Australia, Canada, England, Iceland, Scotland, and Switzerland—spread by a combination of one-to-one telephone communication and face-to-face joke telling. Unlike with most sick jokes, there was a catalyst. The explosion was a singular event that virtually every American knew about, while other sick jokes had no news hook, no reason for being told at that particular point in time.

  Simons, who collected the jokes from small business owners, company workers, elementary and high school students, college students, and teachers between late February (almost one month after the explosion) through June 1986, called them “a grieving ritual which also served to vent anger and alleviate disillusionment at the failure of NASA—symbol of the USA. And, by chance, because of the presence of a teacher among the crew, it was an opportunity to strike out at teachers, the symbol and perceived cause of the failure of the American public school system.”

  Mercifully, the Challenger joke cycle ran its course in three months. But a decade later, after Mosaic and Netscape seeded the viral plain, jokes, memes, and information of all sorts could be dispatched to dozens, if not hundreds, of people at the click of a mouse, and the pace of virality picked up dramatically. Many early online chain letters involved virus hoaxes, which urged recipients to warn everyone in their address books. One of the earliest warned of the “Good Times” virus, which, the email claimed, could rewrite hard drives and therefore erase every file on users’ computers. It urged recipients to alert everyone they knew. The virus warning was itself a virus. By passing on the message, the recipient was unknowingly adding to its viral coefficient, helping to clog email gateways. It wasn’t just virus hoaxes that spread far and wide over the Internet. Jokes, quotations, faux health alerts, oddball conspiracy theories, and articles that touched someone’s heart, funny bone, or both were commonly dispatched onto the viral plain. It was only a matter of time before businesses began to recognize the benefits of viral campaigns to extend their brands, and in the process increase sales. They just had to figure out how.

  The answer came from Burger King in the form of a guy dressed up as a chicken willing to do whatever you wanted. The brainchild of ad firm Crispin Porter and Bogusky in 2004, the “subservient chicken” was one of the first mega-successful corporate viral campaigns. One component involved a series of wacky television spots, starring a man in a chicken suit. In the first, a guy in his living room orders the chicken around; the tagline was “Chicken the way you like it.” Another showed a rodeo cowboy riding the chicken before a cheering throng: “The only way to beat it is to eat it.” A third featured two man-sized chickens in a cockfight. But it was the ensuing interactive Web campaign that turned it from idle curiosity into a phenomenon.

  Crispin launched a website with the chicken in a living room, encouraging visitors to type commands and watch him perform what they asked, as long as it corresponded to one of more than three hundred prerecorded moves. A user could order the bird to do everything from a pushup, a cartwheel, a back flip, or even a moonwalk like Michael Jackson to peck, pee, shake his booty, and turn off the lights. But the chicken would hold the line at anything obscene (such as a sex act). He would respond by approaching the camera and wagging his finger in disapproval. And if told to eat a Big Mac from McDonald’s, he would stick his finger down his throat.

  Within a week, the chicken hosted more than 20 million visits, with the average user spending an astonishing 5 minutes and 44 seconds on the site. Word spread virally online and off, with the media, particularly broadcast, amplifying the message with some 7 million mentions of the campaign. More to the point, sales of Burger King chicken sandwiches increased 9 percent a week in the month following the site’s launch.

  [ CATCHING THE WAVE ]

  Pete Healy of Mentos heard about the geyser phenomenon after his marketing director tuned in to National Public Radio, which ran a segment on it. Healy told a Wall Street Journal reporter that Mentos was “tickled” by the video. Although he didn’t mention it, he did wonder about liability. “You hope people have common sense and won’t allow their three-year-old to stand over a bottle of exploding soda,” he said. Healy called Grobe and asked if there was anything the company could do to help?

  “Send Mentos,” Grobe replied.

  Healy did more than that. Although he knew there would be risks to involving Mentos in this type of new-media campaign, in the end, Mentos was candy, not a cure for cancer. How much effort would people put in ridiculing it? “As long as we maintained a light touch and were authentic, we figured we would probably be okay,” Healy says. “We knew there were parodies of the old Mentos TV ads. It didn’t bother us; in fact it showed people were engaged with the personality of the brand.”

  When Grobe and Voltz appeared on the David Letterman show at the end of June, Healy dispatched the Mentos-mobile, a Pontiac Solstice convertible wrapped in Mentos graphics, which was parked outside the theater, while street marketers in Mentos T-shirts toting six-foot rolls of Mentos gave out candy to passersby. At the same time, the Coca-Cola Company, slower on the uptake, didn’t know what to think. A Coke spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal, “We would hope people want to drink [Diet Coke] more than try experiments with it.” She added that the “craziness with Mentos” didn’t “fit” Diet Coke’s “brand personality.”

  Michael Donnelly, the company’s interactive director, admitted that Coke wasn’t prepared for this. But in July the soft-drink maker relaunched Coke.com with a new focus: consumer-generated media that celebrates creativity and self-expression. Within days of starting his job at Coke, Donnelly contacted “the eepy.com guys,” as he called them. This led to a powwow between Coke, Mentos, Grobe, Voltz, and Google, which also wanted in on the action.

  The companies agreed to work together to support the performers in a second Mentos-Coke sprinkler video, which Grobe and Voltz dubbed The Domino Effect. At the end, there was an advertisement that linked to Coke.com or cocacola.com, announcing a contest. For three months, people could submit their own videos of ordinary objects doing extraordinary things, and Grobe and Voltz were the judges. One that Grobe says he particularly liked involved balloons, Mentos, Diet Coke, and a series of chain reactions. Coke supported the campaign by buying up hundreds of search keywords on Google, MSN, and Yahoo, anything relating to Coke, Mentos, and explosions, and counted 1.5 billion ad impressions from the campaign.

  Still, with 5 million downloads on Google Video, Grobe and Voltz’s second video wasn’t nearly as popular as the first. That’s because they can be extremely hard to replicate. On YouTube some videos have been downloaded tens of millions o
f times—a cat playing the piano, a beauty contestant unable to string together a coherent sentence, a music video set on treadmills at a gym, a kid acting out a fight scene from Star Wars with a broomstick, a cackling baby. At first blush there may not seem any rhyme or reason behind their appeal, a secret code that, when deciphered, guarantees a certifiable hit. Yet there are shared characteristics to some viral videos, some of which are created by companies to advertise their products. There was:

  • A two-minute Honda Accord web video consisting of one continuous shot of a Rube Goldberg–like contraption made entirely out of car parts.

  • A series created for the Sony Bravia HDTV featuring explosions of paint covering whole buildings, thousands of bouncing balls, and giant clay rabbits, all in vivid color.

  • A Dove Evolution ad of a normal-looking woman instantly transformed into a supermodel before our very eyes. Tagline: “No wonder our image of beauty is distorted.”

  • The cheesy Blendtec Will it blend? series, showing an old guy in a lab coat blending everything from golf balls to hockey pucks to marbles and iPods.

  What do they have in common? For one, they are fun to watch and the antithesis of the hard sell. They offer the audience a value proposition. In exchange for entertaining us the companies are afforded the privilege of mentioning their product. The narrative of each video is woven tightly into the brand’s message. For Honda, it is the Rube Goldberg device made from car parts, which represents the idea that the Honda Accord simply works. Sony’s ad played up the Bravia’s color and image clarity. Dove’s idea expanded the idea of beauty to encompass more than twiggy supermodels. Blendtec wants everyone to know how powerful its blenders are. The videos are short (less than two minutes), clever—and make viewers want to learn more: the Honda ad sent more than one watcher to the Web to figure out how it was done. So did Dove Evolution.

  JibJab ( jibjab.com), a flash animation studio based in Los Angeles, is one of the few to build a business around replicating viral success. Conceived by Evan and Gregg Spiridellis, JibJab has attracted a worldwide following with its funny, satirical political cartoons. The Brooklyn-born brothers had their first viral success in 2000 with the release of an animated short featuring the Founding Fathers rapping about the Declaration of Independence. Then, during the run-up to the presidential elections, they hit 5 million downloads with a video of George W. Bush and Al Gore slinging dirt at each other—this at a time when the majority of Internet users were on dawdling dial-up modems. To follow up they had fun at the expense of Arnold Schwarzenegger with Ahnold for Governor, which got them admitted to the Sundance Online Film Festival. But it was This Land, a political parody of the 2004 George Bush–John Kerry campaign set to the classic Woody Guthrie tune, skewering “liberal wienies” and “right-wing nut jobs” alike, that thrust them into the big time. After seeding the virality by sending the link to the 130,000 people on their email list and premiering the video on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (which averaged 5 million viewers per show), the brothers Spiradellis’s Web server almost “spontaneously combusted” under the onslaught.

  “The more people you can email, the faster you get viral adoption,” says Greg Spiradellis, who got his MBA at Wharton. The Tonight Show acted as a huge multiplier. Between the two, “this is how we were able to turn 130,000 emails into 80 million streams.” Naturally, they released a video leading up to the 2008 election called Time for Some Campaignin’ that featured Barack Obama atop a flying white unicorn, crooning dulcet tones imploring “change” and John McCain exhorting conservatives to lend him a helping hand, with Hillary Clinton, George Bush, and Dick Cheney competing for screen time. When Newsweek asked Spiradellis the secret to JibJab’s success, he replied, “It’s all about potty humor and politics.”

  JibJab has been capitalizing on its popularity by embracing the Netscape business model—attracting people to its website with regular parodies and free e-cards, then attempting to monetize a tiny fraction, charging $13.99 a year (or $4.99 a month) for a premium subscription. This gains you access to “content you can use for expression, which has value,” Spiradellis says. For example, a subscriber can insert his head on one of the characters and send it out as an e-card to all of his friends, or post it on his MySpace page. Even nonsubscribers can do that, which is what 12 million people did with the Obama-McCain Time for Some Campaignin’ video. “Traditional TV guys don’t get it,” he says. “It’s a new medium and requires new creative storytelling formats. A twenty-minute sitcom on the Web is precisely the wrong way to go about it. People want to engage in content.” Besides, “Why make TV shows when you can make content and distribute it without gatekeepers?”

  [ WHAT NOT TO DO ]

  Because the odds of benefiting from a phenomenon like the Mentos–Diet Coke geysers can be less than the chances of winning American Idol, some companies have been trying to game the system, with decidedly mixed results. Samsung released a series of videos on YouTube featuring a Saint Bernard named Sam on a plane. The few who actually watched characterized them as “lame,” “a stinker,” and “zzzzzz.” One user summed up: “I would really like to know which agency and production company came up with this uninspired piece of crap.”

  Dove has also had hits and misses. It scored big with Evolution, a Web video that illustrates through makeup and software how an ordinary woman can be transformed into Mischa Barton hot. On YouTube alone, several parodies were viewed a total of 5 million times. (Personal favorite: Slob Evolution, in which a male model eats, drinks, and smokes himself into someone who resembles Christopher Hitchens.) Dove also issued a flop when it tried to foist a promo for Dove Cream Oil Body Wash on to the YouTube community. The video received more than ten thousand comments, almost universally negative. FedEx, on the other hand, squelched any viral marketing potential by threatening legal action against a customer who had created furniture out of the air shipper’s boxes, then posted the pictures on his website. “The worst thing you can do is act like a grumpy old brand and send out cease-and-desist letters,” says Michael Maslansky, president of Luntz, Maslansky Strategic Research. “It makes you look bad.” Adds Mentos’s Healy: “If I had been FedEx, I would have gone online and created a ‘Design Your Own Dining Set Out of FedEx Cartons’ contest.”

  There have been some modest corporate-inspired Web video successes, too. Millions of YouTube users have watched Tom Dickson, the earnest founder of Blendtec, a blender manufacturer, pulverize an iPod. He also stars in several other must-see Will It Blend? videos released on YouTube and Blendtec’s own website, where he destroys baseballs, rake handles, light bulbs, magnets, marbles, half a rotisserie chicken, and a 12-ounce can of Coke. The month after the videos first hit the Web, Blendtec sold four times as many blenders online as it had over the previous monthly record.

  Mentos continued to sponsor Grobe and Voltz, helping them perform with Blue Man Group in Boston. They appeared on French TV and gave performances in the Netherlands, Belgium, Turkey, and Pittsburgh. “We are earning a decent living as performers and it all started with a simple Web video,” Grobe says. The company also struck up a relationship with Steve Spangler, a highly caffeinated educator who has made a career teaching teachers how to teach science. A staple at conferences, Spangler, whose father was both a magician and scientist, speaks to roughly 150,000 teachers a year. And at each conference he can’t resist but demonstrate the power of Mentos and Diet Coke.

  Spangler, who claims to have set off more than five thousand Mentos—Diet Coke geysers over an eight-year period, markets toys based on this theme. The first to hit the market was the Steve Spangler Geyser Tube, which sells for $4.95 and says on the label “powered by Mentos.” He also released the Great Geysers Kit for $19.95, which contains a geyser tube, test tubes, chemicals like citric acid and baking soda, macaroni, string, a basic science kit, an instruction book explaining carbonation, and, of course, Mentos. Spangler filed for patents and receives any and all money, since Mentos isn’t entitled to any of the revenue
. Spangler even paid for the mints.

  What’s the secret of a campaign like this? “You have to have a light touch and be careful not to act like a guy in his mid-forties trying to be a hipster,” says Healy, the fifty-something Mentos marketer. “It doesn’t smell right.”

  III

  VIRAL NETWORKS

  7

  eBay and the Viral Growth Conundrum

  Faster, Pussycat. Scale! Scale! Scale!

  At the onset of the tech boom, Pierre Omidyar, a young, French-born Iranian American computer programmer, placed an order through Charles Schwab to purchase stock in 3DO, a video-game maker. He did it shortly after the company announced plans for an IPO, far in advance of the actual date. Yet by the time his buy order went through, the stock had jumped 50 percent. Investment bankers and other insiders got in at the initial $15 per share, while regular people like Omidyar were forced to pay a hidden, variable premium to wait in line. That’s not how a free market is supposed to work, he thought. Musing over the ideal market mechanism, he came up with the concept of an auction, and the emerging Web, he realized, was the perfect place to hold it. There could be complete transparency, equal access for all, and the price of a good or service would be whatever the highest bidder was willing to pay. Since Omidyar held a full-time job and could only work on his own pursuits in the evenings and on weekends, it took him a couple of years to get around to building it.