Viral ads are online promotional campaigns that are so cleverly designed that they spread “like a virus,” quickly and massively, amongst the target consumers and users of the product. Viral Marketing is the creation of those ads - marketing messages.

If done correctly, people will forward the ad to all their "friends" and/or start talking, texting, and emailing about the ad. It is essentially a great piece of PR work.

Today “viral” typically comes in the form of an email or video. In the future, I suspect it will be primarily pictures and video, since those are  the mediums pundits predict will dominate the web in the years ahead.

However, before you tattoo your company logo on your forehead, take a wacky picture of yourself with your new iPhone, and email the photo to everyone you know, it is important to know a few of the basic requirements of a good viral ad.

Specifically:
-    There must be a huge fun (new, unique, interesting or sexy) factor
-    Good writing and imagery are critical
-    It should be easy to forward via email and/or posting
-    The act of forwarding it makes the sender appear cool or in-the-know
-    The sender should expect a reply, such as, “That's cool.”
-    It must be blog-worthy
-    People must drive it because people are credible; corporations are not.

Steve

Last Sunday I was creating a presentation in PowerPoint that required narration and I wanted it embedded in the file. I had been assured by a couple IT types that PowerPoint had a narration function that would easily allow me to create the presentation and post it to YouTube for distribution.

The short version to this saga is I spent about 12 hours fiddling around in PowerPoint. The program, like it’s mother, was inflexible, limited and does not want to play nicely with YouTube. I decided to turn off my machine and try again on Monday, when my energy was renewed.

As dawn broke on Monday, I had an epiphany. I decided to see if Apple’s presentation program, Keynote, would work better. No surprise, less than two hours later I had made significant improvements to the presentation and posted it on YouTube, with one-click.

Someday Microsoft's desktop domination will end. That will be a joyous day for all the Marketers who hate crappy products.

My name is Steve Hartkopf. I am the founder and Managing Partner of Aligned Marketing.