Is Viral Viable?

Viral marketing is entertaining and hip, but does it really do a better job of selling products than regular ads?

by Courtney Weaver

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Trevor is your typical intern. A 19-year-old student at the University of Cincinnati, Trevor spends his workweek answering the phone, juggling personal assistant duties, and—most important—taking orders. Unlike most interns, however, Trevor the Mentos intern has a few extra supervisors to report to: an entire audience of online viewers.

From 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, Mentos and Trevor fans can sign into the intern's schedule at mentosintern.com, assigning him jobs such as calling them in sick to work or making a "Happy Birthday" video for their friends. As fans watch Trevor perform his quirky tasks, they can also interact with each other on the site's live chat board.

Mentos shot to viral fame last summer when a video produced by entertainment site EepyBird.com demonstrated what happens when you drop a couple of Mentos into a few Diet Coke bottles. The Mentos-Diet Coke "geyser" video quickly began generating thousands of views per hour, and within three months its view count passed the 5 million mark.

How to Measure Viral Success

While Coca-Cola (KO) initially shied away from the nontraditional brand placement, Mentos capitalized on it, shipping Eepybird thousands of Mentos packs for their experiments and sponsoring "Make Your Own Mentos Geyser" competitions. The results paid off: Mentos sales were up nearly 20% last year, the highest such increase in the company's history.

This summer, it seems, Mentos is riding the wave of its success. Within the first week of its "Intern" site, the company had to increase the size of its server and bandwidth in order to accommodate the growing number of site viewers and the length of their stays. According to Cakke, a blog that tracks domain sales and statistics, mentosintern.com is the fastest-growing domain, having generated 30,000 Google (GOOG) hits in its first three weeks.

These figures, however, are hardly how Mentos is choosing to measure its viral success. "Success for this was not going to be hits on a Web site," says Paul Bichler, creative director at Mentos' agency, Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH). "Success for this is how well we can integrate the idea of Mentos into pop culture."

Getting More Creative

With little to no concrete research available on viral marketing, choosing a relatively broad goal such as pop culture awareness seems to be on the safe side. While dozens of corporate viral videos have rounded up millions of video views apiece, there is still no indication that a viral video's popularity will translate into financial success for a company.

Mentos' latest viral foray indicates there may exist one way to ensure tangible viral success: increased consumer participation. By integrating features of social networking into its campaign the candy company is genuinely putting in the effort to build a brand-consumer relationship online and, long term, that may just mean a brand-consumer relationship in the grocery store.

Mentos is hardly the first company to integrate Web 2.0 into a large-scale corporate viral campaign. Over the past year, brands ranging from Brawny paper towels and napkins to Cisco Systems (CSCO) to Bayer's (BAY) painkiller Aleve have devised multifaceted viral campaigns to integrate Web users further into a dialogue with their brands.

Domesticity Boot Camp

Says Todd Riddle, creative director at Fallon Minneapolis, the agency responsible for Brawny's viral campaign: "People understand and are expecting that they can interact with media," forcing ad agencies to "create content that consumers want to engage with."

Brawny did just that, creating a 24-week-long, online reality TV series Brawny Academy, along with a Brawny Academy microsite serving as an online forum for fans. Looking past the types of "marginal improvements" typically marketed by Brawny and its competitors in the past, the brand decided to stop thinking like a paper towel company—and start thinking like a brand, which would send its female customers' boyfriends and spouses to a two-week-long domesticity boot camp.

In spite of such thinly veiled brand placement, the nine Brawny Academy episodes collectively garnered a modest half-million start-to-finish film views in their 24-week run last year. But Brawny claimed that dollar volume increased by 9%, over the previous, unsupported, 24-week period, and the company also saw increased relevance for its brand image: 66% of consumers exposed to the cross-media Brawny Academy campaign said Brawny was a brand they related to, as opposed to 44% of a nonexposed control group.