Thickslab scolds people for creating fake ads for a new SUV via an online make-an-ad campaign.

I understand his distaste as to the method and “success” of the car company getting their name out there by creating an army of ad zombies. However I am certain this kind of viral marketing will return the company very little in the way of sales, which, ultimately is the reason why a company cultivates a name. While Thickslab might find this kind of marketing loathsome, in posting just one word about it, he has ironically added to the meme, so in that sense, the campaign works. But I’m not sure that the means justifies the end.

When a company puts a product out into the world, it’s the acme of that campaign for the name to become the next Xerox or Kleenex. To have people using your name as innocuously as one would for the word “tree” or “boogers” is the height of product recognition and longevity. I don’t find brand name co-opting offensive since it’s part of a capitalist culture and we’re the winners of that last cold war. Why shouldn’t we celebrate?

An online viral campaign that kills a server is every ad exec’s dream. (Bloggers dream of this too, in hopes to move up the Long Tail. Guilty here. I’ve seen bloggers go link crazy with the latest meme so that their traffic shoots up via del.icio.us or Technorati) However in some cases, like the Tahoe site, the result might be detrimental to the product. This SUV is going to be known as “the Tahoe – that car that everyone made fun of, online”. I can’t see how such negative online presence would assist in one sale of this car. The only people looking at these ads are people laughing at the product or people curious about the meme. If it draws in a potential client, that shopper might be dissuaded from their purchase due to the “uncoolness” message that’s being generated. Take Nike’s and PSP’s world wide urban graffiti campaign. They didn’t count on bloggers like BoingBoing to point out the campaign’s poseur status and were forced to watch their campaign burn out of control, harder than a Barbie in a barbecue.

Speaking of Barbie, some companies have dropped the ball hard with viral marketing. Marvel Comics threatened to sue Fenster Film’s hillarious GI Joe PSA mash ups into oblivion (oddly enough, you can still see these at the public domain archive.org). When the site was removed, Marvel released their Joe DVD collection to poor sales. Now they beg for that kind of attention again, letting clips slide, like the morphing Michael Jackson-dancing transformer car. They didn’t understand the medium and it ran away from them. Subaru took a hit when it had the opprotunity to block a news story that claimed that their Outback line of cars were popular with Lesbians. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but religious groups stopped buying Subaru, resulting in a drop in sales.

I think the best way to viral market is to subvert the product to the brink of parody. The Tahoe campaign is riding the negative publicity just to get the name out there, but something like the Subservient Chicken, where a guy in a chicken suit will obey your typed in commands, or even a Jib Jab cartoon, is probably more what they should have been reaching for. Highly tech savvy, Self-deprecating fun and clever, without the ability to cross the line into allowing product mud rucking.

I admit it, I love viral marketing. It’s connective, clever yet extremely dangerous, much like a controlled burning becoming a wild fire. In Pattern Recognition William Gibson wrote about “plants” in the London social scene: people who were paid to go into bars and innoculously start talking to strangers about products, maybe even mention a funny site to visit. Seed planted, that stranger might mention it to someone else in passing. They’d visit the site or see the product and pass on that information to someone else and they tell two friends, and they tell two friends and so on and so on… Whammo, for very little cost, you have an ad campaign. When I first read this I was chilled at the thought of this becoming reality. Then I saw a Futurama where Fry complains that his dreams are being invaded by ads:

LEELA: Didn’t you have ads in the twentieth century?
FRY: Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio… and in magazines… and movies, and at ballgames, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written in the sky. But not in dreams, no sirree.

Ad subversion is inevitable. How we process that ad is important. You can either never mention shopping again, or selectively only speak of products that you know. Or you can be part of the swarm. Good luck with that.

(Thanks to Trevor for the 10 second research)