history of viral videos

for those of you who want some background or history of viral videos
"The term viral video refers to video clip content which gains widespread popularity through the process of Internet sharing, typically through email or IM messages, blogs

and other media sharing websites.
While the viral video phenomenon has occurred in a largely unstructured manner, a number of organizations are attempting to find marketing strategies that rely on the

distribution of viral video, with mixed results." (**i stole that quote from wikipedia, because i was too lazy to write it myself).
anyways, here are some of the classic viral videos:


"the Star Wars Kid"



"the Dramatic Hamster"



"the Sneezing Panda"



"the Numa-Numa Song"



"the Crazy German Gamer"



"the Evolution of Dance"



"Chocolate Rain"



"What-What in the butt"



some external links to some viral songs/videos:
the bananaphone
badgers
ninja by 7 seconds of love

and then there's the classic:
"We Like the Moon"


which became one of the original viral ad campaigns


because of the cheap budget costs, and internet popularity such ad campaigns, no one seemed to care that most of the time they just simply suck.
and so viral campaigns began infesting the advertising industry ever since....
with such internets campaigns like:

happy banking kittens from australia

burger kings "the Subservient Chicken" (this one is actually kinda cool)

the "Ford Sport Ka"



the horrific "7 days of Sentra" campaign ***see earlier post because i ain't reposting that crap.

Viral Marketing even began infesting movies with such campaigns like:
"Cloverfield" which sucked so bad the only way to draw people to it was to really a trailer that didn't show anything, and then let the internet imply the rest.

"Forgetting Sarah Marshall" which ran billboard advetisiments which simply read "Sarah, you suck" and had no information about the movie what-so-ever...designed to build up hype via word-of-mouth (this movie though was pretty good, so i forgive this viral campaign, even though it annoyed me before the movie came out)

and "snakes on a plane" in which the internets popularity forced the movie studio to keep the title, despite being a failure at the box office (***viral campaigns dont always work as planned)

these differring form other word-of-mouth campaigns (like the movie "Serenity" which pushed back its release date 6 months to build up fan hype) in that the viral ads, were designed to let the internet create the advertising campaign.


its only a matter of time before we start seeing LOL cats in comericals.

and in closing i would like to leave you with the classic internets viral video
"All your base belong to us"