It's been a busy week for viral merchandising on YouTube.
On Monday Samsung hit us with a clever short disguised as an "unboxing" video (a trend where fans and bloggers record themselves first step their new gadgets for the first time). The spin on the often anticlimactic genre was the parade of a miniature marching band and baton-twirling ladies that sprang forth from the high-tech box. It lED to a pyrotechnic-laden unveiling of Samsung's new Omni i900 cellphone, which looks and acts a set like Apple's wildly popular iPhone.
To farm and securities industry the video, Samsung employed the U.K.-based Viral Factory. The deuce have partnered regularly in the last 18 months, and the Samsung Omnia (i900) Unboxing video was the ninth since the companies first hooked up, according to an electronic mail from Tony Smith, managing director for the Viral Factory.
When Samsung asks the marketing firm to promote a product, the guidelines are few. "They give us a product (in this case the i900) and a task (in this case create buzz around the launch of the i900)," Smith wrote. "We and so write, create and seed the military campaign."
The day after the Samsung video went online, Electronic Arts Inc.'s EA Sports posted a video response to a fan who had poked fun at a programming glitch in one of its games. About a year ago, YouTube user Levinator25 posted a video highlighting an error in the EA Sports game Tiger Woods PGA Tour '08 that showed the Tiger Woods character standing on water, then slicing a golf ball into the hole. Levinator25 dubbed it "the Jesus shot."
EA Sports' response, recorded in a style similar to its Tiger Woods TV commercials, shows the actual golf pro walking onto a pond and performing the feat. The message that closes the video: "It's not a glitch. He's just that good."
Electronic Arts, one of the world's largest video game publishers, does its viral marketing in-house. "We've done a lot of viral videos," said EA Sports President Peter Moore. "We believe we're reaching a younger audience than with network television."
And because there's not much involved in viral campaigns � beyond getting the OK from Tiger and then shooting and uploading the video � companies can do it without hiring outside firms. Such campaigns aren't "something you can manufacture," Moore said. "You can't actually push it, because [savvy Web surfers] reject that."
So how do you create a successful viral promotion? "By making it good, and by making it relevant to the target audience," Smith said in an e-mail. "This is very hard, as they're a tough bunch to please and the competition is huge."
The free exposure from high-profile blogs, such as Engadget for the Samsung video and golf blogs for the Tiger Woods clip, certainly can't hurt. "We didn't pay to place the clip on these blogs (you can't), but they posted it because it's right for their audiences," Smith wrote.
The two videos also hit the front page of the popular social news website Digg a couple hours apart Wednesday � both submitted by the same user, badwithcomputer, who says he isn't getting any kickbacks either.
"Unfortunately, I won't be receiving a new Samsung phone or a copy of an EA game any time soon," he wrote in an instant messenger conversation. "That Samsung video had 3K views when I submitted it yesterday and now has over 200K and climbing. I feel like a huge Digg story really pushed that thing into going viral (getting a lot of views from Digg and getting picked up by other blogs)."
In three days the Tiger Woods video on YouTube has gotten 706,000 hits; Samsung has had 658,000 in four days.
"People pass it on," Moore said. "It's like pond scum."
Or like a virus.
� Mark Milian
