In the information age a video clip can cross and re-cross the world within minutes via email referrals. Niall Kitson investigates the e-phenomenon of viral video.

Since first appearing in the Nineties as a by-product of the internet's favourite marketing strategy, viral videos have become big business. With websites like Atom and iFilm registering up to 8 million clicks per month, and content ranging from video game trailers to footage of Hurricane Katrina, virals have shown themselves to be as amorphous as their antecedents in the non-virtual world. With the arrival of broadband and the evolution of the net from a text-based to a multimedia resource, the medium of the easily-forwardable clip has established itself as an entirely new viewing experience based entirely on novelty and short sharp shocks. Suddenly trawling the net for more than porn and peer-to-peer sites has become cool. Almost.

Spreading the disease
Devised as a method of quickly spreading a marketing message through pre-existing social networks, viral strategies represented a fundamental shift in the way brand awareness could be spread. Finding a target market had previously involved long and expensive research; now advertisers could develop brand awareness by directing their efforts at a small target market, then sitting back as the message is passed along through email, reaching large numbers of people in a short space of time. The classic example is the Hotmail tag below email messages from hotmail accounts; the accounts are free, and it is easy for recipients to sign up. As marketing guru Dr Ralph F. Wilson notes, 'free attracts eyeballs', and the more people signed up to Hotmail, the more they wanted their friends to have the same service. People's private address books became a powerful marketing tool, and word-of-mouth was going global through the 'miracle' of Outlook Express.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 108.