Word: viral
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Corporations are running into similar problems. They want to ride the viral train for the free publicity, but it doesn't always go where they want it to. In March Chevrolet organized an online make-your-own-commercial campaign for its Tahoe SUV. Green-minded humorists hijacked the campaign, creating widely circulated Tahoe ads with slogans like, "Nature? It'll grow back. Drive a car that costs the earth." Last year, Lee Ford and Dan Brooks, a London-based creative ad development team, came up with an "edgy" Volkswagen spot for a demo reel: a terrorist tries to detonate...
...Jersey man (doomed to be forever known as "the Numa Numa guy") overenthusiastically lip synching to a Romanian pop song. Last December, Saturday Night Live's Lazy Sunday video appeared on the Net after airing on the show. The white-boy rap about cupcakes and Narnia immediately went viral, spawning half a dozen catchphrases and endowing SNL with an aura of cool it hasn't enjoyed since Wayne's World (see page...
...most viral videos come from amateurs, brilliant or lucky camcorder auteurs who just put their work on the Net and watch it take off. Traffic to viral-video sites is surging, driven by ubiquitous broadband Internet access and cheap, easy-to-use digital video cameras. Since last year, visits to Yahoo!'s Video section have gone up 148%. Traffic to iFilm.com grew 102%. YouTube, launched in December, is storming the Web. It already had 9 million unique visitors in February, compared with Google Video's 6.2 million and Yahoo!'s 3.8 million. YouTube's traffic grew another 24% just last...
...Viral videos are powerful, but that power can be a little scary. Once something goes viral, there's no way to get the genie back in the bottle, and some things go viral that shouldn't. One notorious surveillance video, still at large online, shows a suspect in a San Bernardino County, Calif., police station shooting himself in the head with a pistol. Another video shows a chubby kid waving a golf-ball retriever like a light saber. The kid, Ghyslain Raza, was 15 at the time. Three of his classmates found the footage and put it online...
...every video goes viral. The vast majority go nowhere--YouTube hosts millions of hours of drunken parties, tearful confessions, smiling babies, sleeping cats and screen grabs from World of Warcraft, all doomed to obscurity. Nike showed a firm grasp of the form with a popular clip, an ad stealthily designed to look like amateur footage, showing soccer deity Ronaldinho putting on a pair of sneakers and then, incredibly, nailing the crossbar with a soccer ball four times in a row. Some of the successes are accidental. For a while, one of the popular movies on Google Video...