Viral Videos and Instant Fame: How Internet Redefines Stardom

Back in the pre-internet era, becoming an icon or a sensation proves to be very difficult. You will have to wait in long lines for auditions, enter singing contests, form your own band, do something really, really embarrassing in your neighborhood, or, with luck, be discovered by talent scouts here and there. And most take years to take a place in the spotlight.

Nowadays, you can achieve fame by having the right resources. With good use of a personal computer and your internet connection, you can now be popular. Nearly every bit of information placed in the internet spreads virally, even videos. Upload a really interesting video of yourself doing some crazy stunt, and in a few days, the rest of the world is watching you. Congratulations, you are now the star of a viral video.

A viral video is a video that you can find online that’s either funny or annoying, and will get you asking your friends to watch it. In turn, that friend will ask his friend to watch, and his friend to another, thus spreading like a virus, until it eventually becomes a craze.

Enter Gary Brolsma aka the Numa Numa Guy: he achieved instant fame by uploading the Numa Numa Dance, a video of him lip-syncing and dancing in newgrounds.com. It got over 13 million views two years after it was put there. The video also put him in newspaper stories and guest appearances in radio and TV shows. To date, he has been viewed by 700 million people.

Youtube.com is what you may call a nest of viral videos. You can find a lot of interesting clips there: dancing robots with the use of stop motion, documentaries about the emo culture, practical jokes, guitar solos and covers in front of a webcam, and even live clips of certain performances by anonymous people. Young international artists like Charice Pempengco and Justine Bieber got their share of fame in Youtube.

Rick Astley also had a share of rekindled fame with the video of his single “Never gonna give you up,” which was a hit back in the late 80’s. People use his video as a practical joke: a guy gives the victim a link and claims that it’s relevant to what they’re currently talking about. To the victim’s surprise, he’s already redirected to the video. Astley himself also enjoys and acknowledges this prank.

The internet is a source of limitless possibilities. With the right resources, you can be famous in a snap of a finger. Who knows? The next time you video yourself tripping down a staircase may be the next biggest internet thing.

Viral Video Gone Wrong or Fake Viral Marketing: The Case of the Girl who Dies

Recently, a video popped up on YouTube, one which featured something called a “Prank Gone Wrong.” In it, a couple of friends play a prank on another female friend by surprising her once she gets home. The girl, in terror, runs out of the house and rushes headlong to the street, where seconds later a sedan runs her over. The pranksters, who were filming all this time, rushed out to witness the scene, eventually filming the carcass of their friend, who was suddenly no more than roadkill.

I’ve seen many of my friends post the video on FaceBook, genuinely creeped out at the scene where the girl was run over by the car. To be fair, the video looks quite believable when you first watch it or when you don’t watch it too closely. There have already been many discussions about the video on blogs and message boards, and there have been YouTube response videos discussing and debunking the video.

Most of them offered the same verdict: FAKE.

Clearly, when you watch the video and analyze the post-accident scene, the body of the girl was lying in a position inconsistent with the direction of impact. Hey, that sounded a bit like a piece of CSI dialogue. Also, why would anyone put up a video that can incriminate them in the death of a friend? Besides, YouTube should have removed the video right away if it were real. Lastly, there have been links posted of the allegedly dead girl’s FaceBook—which shows she is alive and well, and there are even different versions of the video posted on her FaceBook wall.

Yep, not only was the video fake, but it was also some sort of marketing ploy. What’s up? For one, I don’t see how anybody can benefit from a marketing standpoint by making a video like this. Maybe I’d understand it more if it was relating to a movie or a TV show, but this isn’t like how it was with the viral videos for the movie The Blair Witch Project. This went beyond what viral marketing is about, with many people finding that the video bordered on tasteless and offensive.

Okay, so the actress (Cindy Vela) has garnered a ton of publicity for her role in the video (the girl who “dies”). I guess that’s something. And it’s probably the end result they aimed for. Now, Cindy is a bit of a high-profile internet celebrity, posting on FaceBook (through admins) and Twitter (maybe through admins as well).

While technically the viral video broke no rules and it did accomplish its promotional goal, I believe there should be standards when working with viral marketing. You don’t really want to disturb or play with millions of people’s psyches like that. Hopefully, marketing firms and individuals will look for better alternatives in the future—alternatives that don’t show someone ending up dead.

Still, the video was fun in a creepy way, and it’s a relief knowing that nobody actually died.

Understanding the Way Viral Marketers do it

The word “virus” or “viral” usually connotes something negative– it is associated with diseases and some other unwanted parasitic microbes stuck inside your body. You may not have it, but it’s greatly contagious: it’s something that you will get when you’re in contact with someone who has it.

Marketers, however, want to achieve an ad that works the same way as a virus: one that spreads like an epidemic in no time. Although no, they don’t want to make a vast population feel sick (although sometimes they do just that,) as salesmen, they want their products to be well-known by this mob. Cue in something funny, amusing, annoying or anything that you’ll remember every time you dare close your eyes. And it’s (supposed to) have something to do with a product.

Simply put, viral marketing is any strategy that encourages your viewers to pass the marketing message on. A guy will start talking to his friends about the ad he just saw, then his friends will do the same to their other friends, and so on. It is pretty much how your common cold works. This is also referred to as the “word-of-mouth” marketing (which is how some folklores and mythical stories are passed down and preserved). Now that internet and search engines came into the playing fields, it’s much easier to ‘spread the word’ because people, familiar to you or not, are all over the internet, and all it takes is an e-mail to their addresses and the word is finally released. Mission accomplished.

Hotmail.com, one of the first email services for free, served out a classic example of a viral marketing strategy, one that is fairly easy to understand:

1. Give away free email addresses and some other services,
2. On every free message sent out, put a tagline that  says, “get your free private email at http://www.hotmail.com,”
3. Wait for the people who sends messages unintentionally advertise Hotmail to their friends and co-workers,
4. And to others who can see the email,
5. Let them sign up for their own free email accounts
6. Repeating step 3, sending more mails to more people.

Basically, the strategy worked wonders, at least at that time. Who knew that by tagging a plug in emails can disseminate information quickly? Apparently, Hotmail did.

Nowadays, viral marketing strategies include videos, those that tried to become the next Rick Roll or Numa Numa dance. As far as cyber-marketing goes, it is now the war of the memes. (an aspect of pop culture that’s mostly parodied, and made into a joke, mostly present in the internet)

It’s amazing how the internet revolutionized marketing. Feel free to confess that even you also caught an advertisement over the internet. And ended up buying.