Many companies, brands and agencies have gone crazy for virals over the last few years. The idea that you can get your potential customers to spread your message for you, for free, is a compelling one. But since the good old days of simple, funny clips making their way around the web over several months or years, a new breed of experts has created a commercial industry to ensure that a viral ‘goes viral’ within days, as opposed to being an unknown quantity or worse still, falling completely flat.

The problem with this guarantee of viral success, measured by the amount of ‘views’ a video gets, is that it takes away the need for the funny, cool and sexy elements that have always been needed for something to go viral by itself. It opens up the door for out and out branded commercials to be seen by a ton of people without the need for it to be good enough to send to their mates.

Now this is interesting because it opens up quite a dilemma for marketers that were once drawn to the simplicity and low cost of viral marketing. Planning, developing, producing, seeding and measuring a viral campaign is now as complicated, technical, difficult and expensive as traditional marketing channels. Budgets to make something go viral properly surpass five-figures with ease, and to absolutely guarantee success, can run into six-figures. For me, this is a dilemma because for something to be attractive as a viral, and therefore good enough, funny enough, and indeed cool enough to send on, then it has to bypass the traditional hit of brand, product and logo associated with all other forms of advertising. It has to appear so unbranded as to be surely less effective on a measurable, bottom line sort of way…the sort of way Alan Sugar would like, that put’s money in the bank as a direct return on the advertising spend.

Another factor that is changing the way viral advertising can work is the increasing amount of convergence between media channels, and the introduction, almost every week it seems, of a new platform to sell to consumers. At what point is a commercial a viral? At what point is a viral a commercial? Cadbury’s drumming gorilla, and T-Mobile’s train station dance flash-mobbing have both ‘gone viral’ as well as appearing across all other types of advertising media. At what point will viral no longer exist as an individual marketing term? At what point will it simply fall in line with all other forms of advertising and become just another part of the agency bill? Some would say it already has. I think the term viral has been and gone, as a useful term anyway. Everything in advertising is trying to be viral now, and it would be a foolish agency that didn’t include in a response to a brief, a concept that gets people to talk about a brand or product to each other, to spread the word, to spread the brand.

In a world where advertisers are now trying to squeeze every last penny out of their shrinking budgets, will they soon think about just sticking with instant, measurable advertising on TV and in the press? Will they opt to save their cash, rather than spending big on producing a hit-and-miss ‘viral’ that needs forcing into circulation, and crow-barring into the mass consciousness with mass ‘seeding’? Who knows….anyway, it’s nearly the end of the day, so I’m off to check out some funny stuff on youtube before I head home…