As mobile phone operators try to establish ground rules for media rich messaging (see article below), so advertisers have hit on some innovative and, for perhaps for the first time, effective means of exploiting Web interactivity for promotional purposes. 2001 has seen an increasing use of ‘pop-unders’, small windows that are integrated into text pages. By inserting into these windows streaming video, Macromedia Flash or 3D viewing, marketers have begun to exploit the visual potential of higher bandwidth delivery. Automobile manufacturer Ford has pioneered some of these techniques in its Explorer campaign on Yahoo making use of floating dynamic HTML layers. While CNET and the San Francisco Chronicle have developed advertisements that manage to combine all three techniques.

Another motor car manufacturer, Honda has been at the forefront of exploiting a different form of (auto?) promotion viz. Viral marketing. Viral marketing, that is to say harnessing the powerful push that comes from the recommendation of friends, – a sort of word of mouth on steroids, has been around on the Web for some time. In 1996 by tagging a link at the bottom of a Hotmail user’s mail referring the recipient back to Hotmail, Microsoft’s message service managed to develop its member base quickly and most importantly, cheaply. Nowadays, ‘tell a friend!’, ‘pass this along!’, messages are two a penny and to be effective, announcers have had to put on their thinking caps to exploit the rich lode effectively. Numerous companies have set themselves up as viral market experts, notably Viralon, (inventors of cohort marketing) the Australian company XT3, and Qbiquity,. These offer ‘cheap’, effective viral campaigns often linked to reward schemes or interactive games, with the number of successful recommendations independently monitored.

The trick is of course, to keep the interest of the 'virus' recipient long enough for them to want to pass it on. Honda’s technique was to make a series of short, amusing videos about and around their latest model which were then converted and compressed before being e-mailed as attached files to only 500 Honda employees. According to Marketing Sherpa over 4.5 million people have now seen the films and visited the web site.

In 1999 the producers of the film The Blair Witch Project created a web site giving the impression that the film’s events were real and within a very short time the film’s notoriety shot up. In 2001 the Stephen Spielberg film Artificial Intelligence benefited from an elaborate viral marketing campaign involving obscure references to a mysterious Dr Jeanine Salla making use of web sites as far apart as Rumania and New Zealand.

Viral campaigns are not always successful and there may be a fine line between a fun item and unsolicited spam but next time, before you say you are not influenced by advertising, check your recent e-mail attachments! Whassup!
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Nigel BARNETT