What is important is Google’s lack of interest in their 404 page.

10 years ago that little “Did you mean: ” was truly inspired. There was a time when I though “Wow! Google thinks of everything”. And that’s what great design should make you think and feel. At first you get that little warm glow when it seems to understand you despite the fact that you did something stupid and then after that you forget about it because it just fits in with your life. It doesn’t stop you on your journey, slap you round the face and then ignore you for getting something wrong. That kind of thing isn’t fun.

So I was pretty surprised to see this when I missed an ‘n’ off the word ‘adplanner’ in the the URL ‘www.google.com/adplanner’. Check this out:

This is a 404 page which, I guess is one of the most well-known error codes, given that we’ve all seen a couple in our time. Developers and designers often ignore them because they mostly feel that people should either get that kind of thing right first time or it happens so infrequently that it doesn’t matter. I was pretty appalled by this particular page. Of course it isn’t a critical user journey for Google but, being Google I guess 20 billion people see this every 10 seconds.

First, I though this was just because the Ad Planner application is in Beta. Turns out all of the applications lead to the same unhelpful 404 message. Take a look.

Okay, of course it’s not Google’s fault that I think slower than I type but there is an opportunity for Google to make me think “Wow! Google are wonderful, they think of everything”. It’s about forgiveness. To me, their 404 looks like this:

When surely, me and millions of other fingerly challenged people should be seeing something like this:

I know this is picky as hell but, take the Fail Whale as an example. Fail Whale is a lovely little picture that you see when Twitter is working too hard to process what you requested. People love that little guy and his birdies, there’s even official merchandise and a fan blog.

Never mind who failed, either way, it’s kind of insulting when a system tells you that you did something wrong and it’s not very friendly to simply say ‘An ERROR HAS OCCURRED’ - why so aggressive? When a system brushes over your inadequacies and attempts to guess what you’re after, you simply can’t help but love it. Despite lots of people being mighty upset with Twitter’s downtime, I can’t help think that The Fail Whale is responsible for saving Twitter’s ass despite the competition.

So, in conclusion, let’s just stop being so negative and think about The Fail Whale next time we’re thinking what to do with users who get things wrong.

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Another thing I’ve noticed here which is very clever is that they have called it something which (at the start of the campaign) gives 0 results on Google i.e. ‘Berfishocca’. Pretty smart, think they could have got some better actors though.

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(En français)

There are exactly one hundred million billion new viral marketing campaigns seeded every 10 minutes - the vast majority are completely dire and destined to fail. So what separates success from failure? Well, the best appear to exhibit similar patterns and by using these patterns in your own campaigns you could be on your way to a free buffet and a drunken snog at next Summer’s Revolution Awards.

If you’re smart you’re probably thinking this is all very formulaic and un-creative. Well, consider the following. The drumming gorilla is just a remake of an ad for a shop called West49 in the US. The director Juan Cabral simply used a pattern where he recognised potential and executed it beautifully. The true genius of this idea is his audacity in linking it to something utterly random like a cheap chocolate brand. Juan got a black D&AD pencil for his efforts.

DISCLAIMER: Please bear in mind that absolutely no genuine empirical or meaningful data was used in this study so don’t blame me if your viral lands you in the dole queue. Remember, 90% of this stuff is in the execution. Juan didn’t just put a drummer in a gorilla suit, he personally trained a silver-back gorilla for 3 years to get him to play drums better than Phil Collins, 6 of the rhythm-less beasts had to be ‘let go’ with a lethal injection before he came out with the winning ape. There’s no trickery or CGI - it is pure human endeavour. I’m clearly labouring the point with bare-faced lies but I’m simply stressing that the real trick is in how you use the pattern and the brand in combination.

1. The Brand Master/Slave Bond

Example: John West Tuna

This is a straight-up old-school classic. It’s a no-brainer - you scale a building, you shave your nuts, you fly to the moon and you do all of this to bring to the consumer the finest ingredients, ideas or services that can be found. One famous French cosmetics brand might have 12-year-old divers that swim to the bottom of the ocean to find crushed Jurrasic Pearls, many of which don’t come back but they’ve done it for you because you are worth it! In reality it’s more likely that your client actually does very little for the quality of the product and is actively avoiding the challenge of doing any real work to improve it, hoping that their agency can mask over this little fact. If your product or brand is of a low quality, this is the pattern for you my friend. Clients love this one because it makes them look great. If you’re using sweatshop labour in Indochina, make sure you emphasise the fact that the clothes are hand-stitched by fair young maidens in far off lands. You catch my drift?

2. Brandophilia

Examples: Snickers Kiss, Skittles Rabbit

This is another classic where #1 is reversed so we see the consumer doing obscene and/or comical and/or desperate things in order to get their hands on your wonderful product. This appears to work great for products that are tasty or emotionally stimulating and is often used on a fairly naive and suggestible target market such as children or men.

3. Doomsday Branding

Examples: IKEA Tidy Up

Scaremongery has been a constant favourite in British advertising since the dawn of the TV age. Home cleaning products and health remedies favour this approach because it allows them to scare the shit out of housewives that never paid attention in Chemistry class at school. We see this kind of thing every day - “Clean your toilet with our product or else germs will learn to talk, become obnoxious and criticise your choice of bra”, “See how you’re spreading that lethal chicken juice around your home when you don’t clean your hands properly?” and “See how this beautiful and talented child would have lived had you been driving just 5MPH slower, you bastard!?”. Use this classic wisely.

4. Brand Halo Effect

Example: Honda Cog, Sony Bravia Play Doh or Palline or Foam

This is a recent phenomenon that requires some serious wonga in the KERCHING!! department. The Honda Accord Cog ad from Wieden + Kennedy cost over £3 million - we’re talking blank cheques here. What happens is as follows. A big brand with a large amount of spare cash that they don’t know what to do with hits up a hip agency in London or New York to come up with a totally mentalist campaign and someone senior at said brand has the balls to actually do it (probably because they are fearless and Japanese). The agency thinks of the most mental and agonisingly difficult thing to do, gets some intern to do it and then films everything. They then go to the pub and get trashed on cheeky Vimtos. This is usually pretty good for technology firms that want to appear really clever. And it works great despite the fact that it was actually a shit-hot agency in Soho that came up with the idea, not the lab-coat wearing wonks in the R&D department who spend most of their time testing the sound of closing glove compartments and comparing their beards.

5. Super Hot Product Demo

Examples: Kylie’s Agent Provocateur romp, Anything by Apple, Banned Commercial - Levis, Windows Vista Aero Vs. Linux Ubuntu, Wii Fit

Possibly NSFW (particularly if you work somewhere rubbish).

If you’ve got a really ace product that people already love then it can just speak for itself and you have a really easy job on your hands. Hire Harmone Korine or Vincent Gallo to shoot something really sweet with the product. Apple love this pattern because they just show their product, stick a folksy soundtrack on it and everyone goes ‘Ooooooh, where can I buy it?’ The underlying strategy for tech firms here is to distract the consumer enough so they forget to download your spec sheet and realise they can’t actually do any of the things that they really want to do like go on the Internet e.g. call their mum or download rude pictures of Lindsey Dawn Mackenzie.

6. Hot Unobtainable Product Demo

Examples: MS Surface (The Possibilities), Nokia Evolve, Nokia Morph Concept, Vodaphone Futures (no longer available), BMW GINA

This is similar to #5 but it shows the product doing something that hasn’t really been released and you don’t even know if it’s possible. If you want consumers to know how clever you are, this is the pattern for you. Make sure you get a fairly cheesy female voiceover who sounds like she’s from the future and she’s already bored by this shit but she’s telling you about it anyway. Think robotic sex slaves or being able to play Halo 10 with only your mind!

7. Infovert OR Stunning Visual Presentation of a Truth which Everyone Sort of Already Knew But Needed Someone in Advertising to Tell Them with Nice Pictures

Example: Dove Evolution

This is similar to the Brand Halo Effect pattern because it has a very core and universal truth which is revealed only at the end. This is pretty good if you sell something that is very socially responsible and/or humanitarian. This kind of stuff gets people talking in the pub because it’s simple and people only talk about simple thing because they are partially drunk on cheeky Vimtos. Dove’s genius here is really the fact that they have used this technique at all. Audacity and irreverence is key here.

8. WTF? How Do They Do That?

Examples: OKGO Treadmill Dancing, Human Tetris, Zack Kim’s Guitar Performances, Kobe Bryant Jumping over Snakes or Aston Martins, 3 Year-old solves a Rubix Cube, Burger King Eat Like a Snake, Nike Freestyle, the list goes on.

This is probably the most common (and annoying?) viral pattern right now but it seems to work over and over again. It’s good for sports brands because they can claim their product can do something that it simply cannot and they aren’t really going to get sued for it because they can say it wasn’t them. Flimsy legislation means that you can infer your product adds to the person’s success in some way without saying it outright. What’s more, if you film it in a really crap way using a camera phone you can make it more believable, the more lo-fidelity the better for this pattern really. In a way, it’s better to have something that almost seems possible but it still really needs to be credible. This is a useful pattern if your product is somehow intended to enhance performance such as trainers, sports drinks, vitamins or those cock rings that Durex started punting around recently.

Be careful on the legal front with this one, best not to share this with the legal team at all really - just upload it anyway and pin it on some kid in Reading when the heat is on.

9. Empowerment Branding

Example: Nike - Take it to the Next Level

This is another fairly modern pattern where your regular Joe does something great, power to the people right on! This is very emotionally appealing and is good for high-involvement categories such as football or Tampax.

10. Nice Big Juicy Hits

Example: Blow job on the beach (two girls blowing up a lilo on a beach)

I’m adding this one if you’re fairly desperate and have a client who’s not too precious about their brand. Apparently, the little screenshots of YouTube videos are taken automatically at a very specific point in your movie. Therefore, if you place suggestive imagery at just the right place people will flock to it in droves thinking it has porn in it. Don’t push this one too much as credibility is low. Better off giving this idea to a junior creative that you’re trying to get rid of and let them hang themselves with it. This pattern will only attract randy boys, so if that’s your thing, knock yourself out.

11. Out-of-Character Celebrity

Example: Sad Kermit, Drench Spring Water ‘Brains’.

Think about ’secretly’ filming the normally placid and lovable Terry Wogan blowing his stack and going nuts, slapping the face of his assistant for over-brewing his beloved and delicious PG Tips. Likewise, how about ex-Big Brother’s Jade Goody reciting the periodic table of elements and the early poetry of Keats in order to prove how much better your brain performs after drinking Drench Spring Water? The same pattern worked wonderfully on CHI’s wonderful ‘Brains…’ ad.

This has the added benefit of increased targeting. If you can get someone that a target audience loves and identifies with doing something unexpected, you’re on to a winner. This has to be one of my favourite patterns of the moment.

12. Animal Personification

Examples: Drumming Gorilla, Elephant doing a self-portrait, Rolling Rock Beer Ape

People don’t seem to be able to get enough of this stuff on the YouToobs. Talking dogs, dancing bears, alcoholic dolphins - these are timeless classics that you can pull out if you want to do something non-product focused and irreverent. This is simply for entertainment value and all you can do to brand it is either stick a DOG (the annoying digital ones you see on TV not the ones that bark and poo), do some product placement or something subliminal.

13. Weird Science

Example: Diet Coke & Mentos, Mobile Phone Popcorn, Will It Blend?

Wow, I didn’t realise you could do that with that! Lots of products in the average home feature chemical compounds that can be combined to create a party of noxious or explosive properties that can delight to the senses. It doesn’t even need to be real, the mobile phone popcorn one certainly wasn’t. Get yourself a Bunsen burner off eBay and see what you can do in your nan’s kitchen with some cat food and a bottle of Domestos.

14. Where’s the dignity?

Example: Angry German Kid, Office Worker Freak Out, Numa Numa, Nintendo Sixty FOOOOOUUUR, Leave Britney Alone, Don’t Tase Me Bro!

These things will always be very funny. It’s human nature to pick on our fellow man and then relish the shocking behaviour they exhibit. This is similar to the ‘Personified Animals’ pattern in that this is good entertainment value and you just need to stick your brand in there somehow. Like the ‘Personified Animals’ pattern, because you’re just attaching your brand to something that is already entertaining, you just need to do some intelligent product placement.

The added beauty of this one is that people are likely to remix your stuff and the message can live on forever in the land of internets.

15. It’s business time

Examples: Flight of the Conchords, Box Man

Personally I hate funny songs - that was until I needed my guts surgically inserted back into my body after listening to ‘Business Time’ by Flight of the Conchords. This is some hilarious shit and is on a par with anything by The Mighty Boosh.

Be very careful with this one, if you try and rip something else off blatantly or you simply are not funny enough you might have a Turkey Twizzler on your hands. You have been warned! Take a look at this utterly terrible spot featuring the Honey Monster crimping his head off [Update 15th July: it's now been removed from most places online after legal nonsense from the Boosh]. It simply cannot compete with the genius of the original and it gets no creds for cultural relevance.

16. Super-delusional weirdo

Example: Ask a Ninja, The Unforgivable Series, Master Chief Sucks at Halo 3

This is another entertainment-only piece that will need clever product placement to work for your brand. These can be fairly funny and, looking at what has succeeded in the past, the weirder the better in my opinion.

17. Shock Tactics

Example: Carlsberg & Mentos (Final Destination rip-off)

This one’s fairly simple, you take a situation where the viewer is expecting something very predictable to happen but you shock them with something completely different. With this, it’s really important to make sure that your brand is meaningful to the context, otherwise your brand will benefit nothing. People will talk about your ad but they wont remember what it was for.

18. Violate a Stereotype

Example: Prep Unit - Tea Party, Citroen Alive with Technology

Take two high-level and completely disparate stereotypes, something along the lines of an insurance underwriter and an Emo kid or a mime artist and a lawyer. This can be very product focused as you can use the profession involved with the product somehow. It doesn’t need to be about a profession, Euro RSCG messed with people’s preconceived notions of what you can do with a car in their ‘Alive With Technology’ TVC for the Citroen C4. Why not mess with people’s preconceived notion of what you can do with your own product? Be outlandish and think big. You’re likely to make a lot of money out of this one if you can crack it.

19. Irritating Catchphrases

Example: Budweiser Wassup, Lynx Boom Chicka Wah Wah

This is perhaps the most difficult pattern to do well and you should probably steer clear of it entirely. Quite frankly, the only way this can be pulled off is if you happen to catch some kids drinking in the local park repeating each other saying the same zany thing over and over. What’s great about this is that the catch phrase just needs to be funny, it doesn’t even need to be about your product. This can work well if you are selling your product to young men with a puerile sense of humor, again Nuts readers and people who actually buy Lynx. Another added benefit is that you can get some revenge on those little shits in the park that keep leaving 20/20 bottles and empty fag packets all over your beautiful local Victorian park.

20. Objects Doing Things They Really Weren’t Made For

Example: Guinness Tipping Point, Citroen Car - Alive with Technology

This is very similar to the ‘Violate a Stereotype’ pattern but is more specific. There’s a million miles left to go on this one. Lots of people loved the idea of using fridges as dominoes, why not get two monkeys to drive a Volvo Estate car across the surface of mars to demonstrate the safety and air conditioning? Or have the cranes that cast shadows across London falling in love with cars below, gently hugging them while everyone else has gone to sleep?

These ideas probably seem a bit rubbish but get some creatives pissed on cheeky Vimtos and see them clamoring to tell you their ‘big idea’.

You’ll find there are plenty of opportunities for product placement here if you have a product that is easily recognisable.

21. Connect Video Games to Real Life

Example: Coke Commercial, GamesBreakOut

This is very much aimed at young folks but merging the worlds of immersive gaming and advertising can come up with some pretty funny ideas.

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So there you go, I’ve come up with a few here that I think should help you get started but there are no doubt hundreds more. Feel free to email me your patterns or add them into the comments and I’ll compile them into a ‘Part 2′. So, make up your own, try and identify the patterns in other channels and generally start astonishing your colleagues with your new-found sense of creativity and enlightenment. Then get yourself down to the pub for the afternoon with a pork pie and a bottle of Babycham.

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I’m going to stop by the shops on the way home and pick myself up some yeast and flour and stuff and have a good old bake dance. Get it? Like bREAk dance but baking. Sorry.

Creds: Emily.

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There’s a great article over at the ever-reliable Web Urbanist about guerrilla marketing. They make the point very well that big brands need to steer clear of this area but considering the attention this sort of activity generates online I think there is still a case for it.

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Best bit: “Because if you use ‘bold’ it’s old and wrong.”

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Sega have just released Condemned 2, which is fairly gruesome bloodbath of a game, apparently. And to help ease the spillage of blood they have launched Offset the Evil. It’s like carbon offsetting but it’s evil, a bit like carbon then.

Via Adverblog

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Creds: Emily.

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Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Personally I think it’s way better than this one.

James did this work for MTV recently too.

MTV from James Houston on Vimeo.

UPDATE: Had a chat with James over email, apparently he was offered a record deal over email and he’s not even a musician. I guess that being a recording artist is probably a lot to do with visuals these days.

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It’s probably appropriate to begin by defining our terms. The concept of viral marketing represents a very broad church, commonly used to describe any marketing initiative (predominantly but not exclusively digital) designed to encourage our innate desire to share the things we find appealing; for the benefit and enjoyment of others, and to express something about ourselves as propagators.

Successful viral marketing campaigns create community distributed or propagated content. Online this could be imagery, a video, an application, a game, a story, a simple document or virtually any other piece of digital content. Generally speaking viral initiatives can be categorised as:

Pass along
Self-contained viral pieces, often video or imagery, but sometimes just text, that can be attached and forwarded peer-to-peer, primarily by email or MMS. Often these pieces are also seeded into community sites, viral archives, or across the blogsphere.

Hosted
Self-contained experiences that are hosted on a website or specially developed microsite. This approach avoids the inherent problems with pass along material, and allows a richer, more interactive experience.

Incentivised
A broad category, primarily hosted in structure, describing viral concepts that integrate a direct incentive for users to alert their peers to the piece. Often a part of a prize draw, competition or challenge mechanism.

When talking about viral marketing, we’re generally referring to intentional virals. It’s worth noting that some of the most widely distributed viral pieces are actually non-intentional, or at least non-commercial, primarily due to the power of YouTube and social networking sites. One video that consistently finds itself at the top of the viral charts is StarWars Kid, whose star has made a career of fighting to earn royalties from the est. 900m of impacts his stolen video performance has received.

Criteria for success are relative to business objectives

The extremely diverse nature of viral marketing activity implies that one size of evaluative criteria can never fit all. This presents a significant challenge to benchmarking the discipline. The natural tendency is to fall back on volume reach – how many impacts did the campaign achieve? But this is a distraction. Success factors must relate to the specific objectives of the campaign.

Some viral marketing initiatives are indeed targeted for mass reach, but most have more sophisticated objectives – targeted reach (not just reach, but reaching the right audience), drive to site (requiring an action beyond view/pass along), data capture (requiring interaction), participation (in a promotion or competition) or involving the creation of associated user generated content. It’s impossible, therefore, to benchmark the success of something like the Cadbury’s Drumming Gorilla against the same criteria as Mini Adventures, or as the Virtual Bartender, or Orange’s Unlimited Web Page or Monopoly Live.

Broadly speaking, viral objectives might be segmented as those driving;

1. Action e.g. sign-up, purchase, claim, text.
2. Attention e.g. education about a cause, introduction to a product.
3. Awareness e.g. increasing familiarity of a brand, get people talking .

Viral objectives can be segmented depending on how close the marketer wishes to get to the target.

Put simply, the closer you want to get to the bullseye of Action, the more focus required.

Where specific action is required, total reach is only relevant as an indicator of the universe that may have acted as desired. A narrower sub-segment (i.e. those that fit the target market profile and act as intended) defines the success or failure of the initiative. Unfortunately, whilst mass reach totals may be accessible, this kind of ‘action’ data is rarely published for commercial viral marketing campaigns.

Narrowcast vs. broadcast

It is particularly inappropriate to judge ‘narrowcast’ objectives against ‘broadcast’ criteria. Geographic, demographic, psychographic and affinity targeting are all common restraints within viral marketing. This might be achieved in the way the viral is executed (i.e. content, creative execution or language specifically of interest to the target group), or how the material is propagated (e.g. blogger outreach vs. time-waster portals). A useful narrowcast example is the Nokia Morph Concept - a kind of gadget freak’s fantasy of the future. Commentary on Nokia Morph claims significant success but presumably (data unavailable) on volumes nowhere close to those achieved by broadcast category examples.

Of course, viral ‘targeting’ doesn’t always imply low reach. ShockAbsorber’s Bounce-o-meter has delivered over 4.4m impacts. At first blush one would assume the viral audience is made up of sniggering male office workers. But as a result of the clear call-to-action, 600,000 users have clicked to a ‘Where to buy’ page. In this instance, number of impacts isn’t really important; what matters is raising the awareness amongst women likely to go on to purchase.

There are many examples of supposedly broadcast virals whose success is attributed to volume impacts but in practice may not have been a success at all as a result of inappropriate broadcasting. A useful comparison to the Bounce-o-meter is Kylie’s Agent Provocateur viral, which achieved notoriety and acclaim when 350m viewed the film. Anecdotal evidence suggests a very small proportion of viewers were target market, and the initiative delivered minimal attributable uplift in product sales. But, of course, it did get people talking about the brand.

We’ve suffered examples of this kind ourselves. In Autumn 2007 JPMH released a viral campaign for Nestle Aero designed to promote (free) trial of a new confectionary variant. Our target of 50k trials was fulfilled within a week. A great success? On the face of it. But unfortunately the vast majority of trial claim traffic was driven by UK ‘freebie’ portals and not the targeted banner campaign (the majority of which hadn’t even gone live before the samples ran out). So 50k people tried the new chocolate bar, but not the 50k we wanted. And much of the media budget went astray, disrupting ROI.

Beyond straightforward awareness, if we have no means of measuring active response then it follows that we have no means of benchmarking true campaign success. Transport for London’s Think! ‘Moonwalking Bear’ with 5m impacts may appear successful but without a clear and measurable action, the level of success is impossible to understand. How many of these 5m people actually think about the dancing bear while driving? How many ‘non-accidents’ could be attributable to the campaign? Equally how much Dairy Milk has been purchased as a result of the Gorilla or Trucks virals?

Seeding

Finally the nature of and investment in seeding activity can also unbalance the playing field. Some marketers are attracted to viral specifically because of its perceived low cost of entry. Of course, this is sometimes the case. There are good examples of very low cost virals that have achieved considerable acclaim. But in our experience the potential for success is, broadly speaking, proportionate to investment. Gone are the days when you could send a viral to 50 of your friends during lunchtime and expect it to go half-way round the globe by end of play. Today seeding and propagation costs frequently exceed the production costs of the viral itself. Many broadcast examples, such as Cadbury’s (c.12m), Budweiser ‘Was’ Up?’ (C.100m), Ford Street Ka, or Budweiser ‘Popcorn’, take an integrated approach by simply extending their 30 second TV spots for the web, or filming alternates. High profile hosted campaigns, such as Heineken’s Coincidence, frequently include advertising investment in the media plan. Is it reasonable to benchmark Trojan Olympics, a web only product launch campaign, against the Cadbury’s Gorilla when the latter was already playing on prime-time TV when the spot went ‘viral’ on YouTube?

Access to reliable data

In addition to the difficulty of comparing success across dramatically different campaign objectives, viral benchmarking carries pragmatic challenges. There are limited sources of reliable data available for commercial viral campaigns. We are reliant on published case studies, primarily from agencies as credentials or for award submissions. These are highly unreliable, tend to exaggerate results, and generally omit key data such as budget to enable any viable campaign evaluation.

• Community sites such as YouTube or Kontraband publish view totals for simple video and image virals. But nothing exists to amalgamate such data and these sources offer no information on hosted initiatives.
• Web traffic trackers, such as Hitwise, can offer an insight into current hosted viral performance. But unless the traffic volume is high most initiatives are not covered. At lower volumes the data is again unreliable.
• Pure pass along material that doesn’t require an action from the recipient is, by very nature, untrackable. Some more sophisticated initiatives incorporate some forms of pass along tracker, but this is not published data.

Unpredictability

In practice, the value of benchmarking lies in target setting for comparative evaluation. If campaign ‘X’ achieved ‘Y’, then we should predict/target the same outcome. But the direction and speed at which viral campaigns propagate are highly unpredictable, precisely because of the unpredictable nature of the web community that has a hold on the destiny of the ‘meme’. This can be frustrating for brand owners more experienced with the more scientific models associated with media planning and buying. It is dangerous to forecast outcomes based on the perceived experience of other brands or organizations. Two very similar initiatives can propagate and spread in very different ways, leading to dramatically different outcomes, both of which may be deemed successes or failures.

Even when a viral campaign has all the right ingredients - clear objectives, a significant propagation budget, arresting creativity and outstanding execution - it can easily fall by the wayside. Useful examples are Sony PSP Rappers, L’Oreal’s Consumer Blog, Oslo Health Hearing Test, Bullet Proof Baby, Hot Fuzz IQ and Naked Mail, all of which might have been projected to succeed, but which in practice have had very little impact.

Initiative specific targets

Without access to reliable comparative data, and without the benefit of mirrored circumstance, best practice category examples can only really serve as a point of reference when setting targets for a new viral campaign.

At JPMH our approach is instead to set specific, measurable targets on a campaign-by-campaign basis. These targets are an output of;

• Realistic business objectives of the client brand
• Digital audience
• Desired level of action / interaction
• Concurrent communications activity
• Seeding budget
• Propagation model
• Capacity for accurate measurement

Considering this, ensuring that your viral campaign contains the following features should keep the chances of success as high as possible.

• Simplicity - clear and single-minded proposition
• Striking creative delivery – humour, shock, surprise, intrigue
• Ease of propagation
• Targeted seeding plan
• Measurable outcomes

ML/NM – 23-04-08

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There’s more delightful cuts on his MySpace page.

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Action Figure slow motion video from Stig Nordas on Vimeo.

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Honda are definitely living by their strapline ‘Impossible is nothing’ when they pulled this one out of the bag. It’s a wonderful ad, it’s got passion, determination and drama. It puts the recent trend in viral towards fakery a la Kobe Bryant to shame.

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Really Good Images - All of the cheesiest stock photography you would never pay for. The kind of stuff they can’t give away.

The FAIL Blog - This has to be the funniest of them all. Simply put they are just photographs pointing out abject failures.

PhotoShop Disasters - Incredible feats of anatomical inaccuracy, it’s like a freak show

There’s a million more, I know there is. Add your cruel blogs to the comments.

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While on the subject of innovative videos, here’s one from Manchester band The Get Out Clause who performed their video in front of CCTV cameras around the city. They then wrote to the people responsible for the cameras for a copy under the Freedom of Information Act. Apparently they did it this way because they they couldn’t afford a camera. It’s amazing how creative you can become when you’re on the dole.

Ok, so if we’re going to talk about innovation, let’s talk about RATATAT. The tune is on repeat on my headphones and the video is an absolute delight.

Oh, what’s that? You say you want more innovation. Ok, this has nothing to do with bands and stuff but the execution on this one is ace plus the soundtrack is killer.

You want more? What!? Haven’t you got work to do? Ok, check this one out, it’s a demonstration at TED by Microsoft of their completely ridiculous technology that allows you to mash together thousands of photographs together into a 3d view while being completely lightweight. No doubt they wont ever release it because it is simply far too cool for normal people.

I’m not going to link to the video of Kobe Bryant jumping over a pool of snakes because it’s just plain stupid. Get back to work you.

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The sketch above just makes me think about the way in which we feel we should organise our life. Since abandoning GTD I feel I have more time on my hands simply by only accepting as much work as I can feasibly handle. It’s been working for me for a while now.

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I haven’t had the opportunity to blog much recently. This is mostly down to attending the IA Summit in Miami last week, then the ensuing onslaught of catching up I had to do on on other work. Overall the summit was very good and I’ve returned to work inspired and motivated. The guys at ASIS&T have excelled themselves. I met a tonne of great people that I’m hoping to stay in touch with and will be pestering management to send myself and a couple of other people to the ‘09 summit in Memphis.

If you are in any way involved in the area of user experience I would very much recommend it.

Slideshare really came into its own with this summit and there is a wealth of information on the decks to be found at http://www.slideshare.net/event/ia-summit-08

My new buddy James Kelway at Us