ONE WEB SITE SHOWS A 30-second
video of a man sobbing while he eats fresh strawberries. Videos of a
masked man dancing to the tune of cell phone ringtones are shown on a
second. A third site advertises underwear with embedded tracking
devices, for men who fear their lovers are straying. The creators of
those three sites are among 84 entrants in a viral marketing contest.
All hope that visitors will find their projects amusing enough to
forward throughout the Web. The competition, "Contagious Media
Showdown," which began in mid-May and runs through June 9, is designed
to study viral media and how ideas spread on the Web.
Contest sponsor Eyebeam, a New York-based
nonprofit that studies new technologies and media arts, is looking to
see which sites garner the most traffic, the most links from blogs
(measured by Technorati), and popularity--in terms of how aggressively
the content spreads across the Web--based on rankings provided by
CreativeCommons.org and Alexa.com.
The contest was announced in April, and the
competing sites went live on May 19. All the sites are hosted on a
server provided by Eyebeam.
Eyebeam's Jonah Perretti said the contest was
put together to determine what kind of virulent virals Web-goers could
come up with, and the common characteristics of content with very high
pass-along rates.
In the early days of the contest,
CryingWhileEating.com pulled ahead of its competitors with more than
150,000 unique visitors after just six days. The site features
30-second videos of people crying while they eat, with captions stating
why they're crying. For instance, one caption explains that Daniel is
eating "buckwheat noodles and rooster sauce," and he is crying because
"he ruined Passover."
By the eve of the Memorial Day weekend,
CryingWhileEating.com had 213,570 visitors--more than the second and
third place combined.
Perretti said that the early dominance of the
unusual CryingWhileEating.com shows viral advertisers the difficulty of
predicting which virals will succeed, and which will be utterly
ignored. "If you are creating advertising media for a client, it is
unethical to tell your client that you can create something that will
be wildly viral on the first try," he said. "If you're a client that's
looking for viral marketing, you should expect to do a bunch of
different attempts."
Pete Blackshaw, the co-founder of the Word of
Mouth Marketing Association, also said that the contest demonstrated
the difficulty of predicting consumer reactions. "You're dealing with
the curious black box of consumer emotion," he said. "For all the
practice ... we still never quite nailed the secret formula of consumer
emotion. It's elusive and it acts in weird ways."
Blackshaw predicted that contests such as this
one will encourage advertisers to take advantage of talent or creative
ideas that would otherwise go unrecognized in the advertising world.
"We're in a massive competition for consumer attention in this new age
of consumer control. The reality is that most consumer Web sites are
far more interesting and engaging than most brand Web sites," he said.
"One of the ultimate torture tests for brands is how do we create
content that creates a contagious desire to tell others--and I don't
think anyone's there yet."
"There's probably a few promising ad directors in this list of crazy videos," Blackshaw said.
One site, Blogebrity.com, a gossip Webzine
about bloggers, is using the contest as a trial balloon for a print
magazine. The site is a collaborative project by a number of bloggers,
including Jeremy Hermanns and Greg Johns--who are both with Tribal
DDB's Los Angeles office--and Kyle Bunch--who works for Pinacol, an
Orange County, Calif.-based Web design firm--as well as several authors
who prefer not to be identified. The bloggers behind the site will
continue the site after the end date of the Showdown, and may even
start a print magazine for special editions. "Right now, with the blog
launch, we're trying to build interest for the print mag, to build an
initial subscriber base for a launch," said Bunch, who handles the
sites' design and technical details.
Although Blogebrity trails the leader
significantly in terms of raw traffic (with just 67,670 unique visitors
as of Friday), Blogebrity has garnered an impressive number of
Technorati links--177, compared to CryingWhileEating.com's 119. The
site garnered links from high-profile bloggers like Steve Rubel and
Glenn Reynolds, speculating on whether the site was real--or a parody.
Bunch said that he and the other authors had
been kicking the idea for Blogebrity around for some time, but decided
to launch it as a contest entry because it appealed directly to the
audience they hoped to capture. "We thought the contest, being very
blog-centric and targeted towards our potential audience, provided an
ideal place to introduce the concept," he said. As a result of the buzz
garnered by the site during the contest, a few potential advertisers
have contacted them, Bunch said.
