Viral Marketing (insert terrorist threat here)

One of my favorite viral marketing ideas was the little orange handpuppet video. The premise was a little, fuzzy orange handpuppet was sitting shotgun in this guys car and he was banging his head to the music (some techno stuff). It was funny and short and easily downloadable and emailable (a few megs, maybe). So when you get it in your email, you think its cute or whatever and send it to your friends, they think its cute and so on. THere is no point, it just brightens your day. Eventually what happens is either a corporation buys the rights to use the little character in advertising, or the corporation already owned him and set out to create a viral buzz about the fuzzy guy (which is more likely) and then he debuts on a commercial. This then immediately associates the cute guy that everyone likes and has seen before, with the company and their product. Its like a combination cheap advertising/product branding all rolled into one. "IT" which became the Seguay, had a similar buzz to it before the bust. What the bajillionares in my office have done is they bought a very focused database of names related to a handful of self-help people and started sending them some freebie emails called (I think) "Wisdom Flashes". These were emails that has some sort of feel-good message, something to think about, some free bit of self help. Then they started giving information in the emails about their product to be. Eventually, there was a large base of interested (and willing) parties that would be willing to pay for more of this stuff, which have become online courses. And so on and so on and they have not officially launched yet and still made $18,000 over the weekend.

Whew.

More on their business plan to follow.

Battle Cry Update: one Union Canon, one casualty canon counter.