Wise & Young: The nuances of Gen-Y marketing, branding, advertising, trends, & more

I’ll admit it; I’m in love with the concept of internet viral advertising.

Internet viral advertising is the quick and easy way of creating word of mouth by hiding your brand or product inside a medium (such as movie, image sound) which is so crazy, interesting, funny, scary, etc. that people would pass it along to their friends. Two prime examples of this concept would be Burger King’s Subservient Chicken and Ford’s Ka commercial.

In the last year though, I’m disappointed to see how mainstream and saturated the entire thing has gotten. Furthermore, I’m more upset about the fact that companies using viral marketing treat it more like traditional advertising instead of something that catches our attention.

For it to work now, especially if you want the youth to catch on, the advertisement for the product has to be subtle, but explosive. I know that sounds hypocritical, but stay with me here.

The first key to the advertisement needs to be the word of mouth, but to achieve the word of mouth the advertisement needs to be so damn crazy young people have to share it with their friends. Your brand has to take a risk, but believe me; young people love it when a brand takes a risk. Too many companies are playing it safe and throwing soft balls at us all day. We just bat them off and continue on our day.

Throw us a fast ball and we have to duck, we have to take notice, and we have to focus. So make the advertisement really edgy, but whatever you do, don’t throw your brand in our face at the end or in the middle of the viral advertisement. Earlier this year, Verizon released this horrible viral advertisement called Really Bad Jobs, aimed at the youth of course. It includes a so-so funny advertisement with a lot of huge copyright that screams at us to buy text messaging. Why would I want to spread this video – do you want me to ruin my personal reputation by looking like I’m an advertiser for Verizon?

Make it subtle, make it so we need to figure out who did it - which is just like the comment Kate made in the pervious blog post, “Don’t underestimate the value of making your product seem like the customer’s private discovery.”

But believe me; your brand can make a splash with the youth market if it successfully pulls off a viral advertisement. It has all the right ingredients to sell to the youth: they are edgy, they catch our attention, we usually receive them from a trusted friend, and of course, they are on the internet.