Viral Market - Viral Advertising

Viral advertising has attracted advertisers in recent years, yet little is known about how exactly it works from an information processing perspective. This study extends knowledge by exploring how the emotional tone (pleasant, unpleasant, coactive) of viral video ads affects attitude toward the ad, attitude toward the brand, and forwarding intentions. Results indicate that pleasant emotional tone elicits the strongest attitude toward the ad, attitude toward the brand, and intention to forward. The effects were weaker for coactive tone and weakest for negative emotional tone. These results challenge the common approach of shocking or scaring online users to motivate them to forward a viral video.

Keywords: viral advertising, electronic word of mouth, information processing, emotional tone

Consumers are exposed to hundreds of branded messages each day through broadcast and print media, outdoor promotions, the Internet, and more. With this clutter, the rising prices of media buys, and consumers' increasing sophistication in avoiding advertisements (Manly 2005; MindComet 2006), the industry continues to investigate new ways to reach target audiences. Viral advertising is one such option and a potentially effective way to bypass growing consumer apathy (MindComet 2006). The appeal of viral campaigns is driven by peer-to-peer communication, in which receivers of the message are active participants who often volunteer to spread it further. The very act of spreading the message to one's social network constitutes an endorsement of the brand, which enhances its credibility in the eyes of the receiver (Chiu et al. 2007). A successful viral promotion can reach thousands or millions of otherwise indifferent consumers and motivate them to endorse or interact with a brand.

This potential has made viral advertising an increasingly popular promotional tool for many brands. According to some estimates, 30% of the 4100 brands worldwide have tried viral video advertising (Lindstrom 2009). In the United States, interest in viral video is strong among brands and agencies, and many agencies plan to increase their budgets for it (Feed Company 2008). Consumers are heavily engaged in all types of videos online. The majority of adult Internet users (61%) have watched a video on video-sharing websites, such as YouTube or Google Video (Purcell 2010), which host much of the viral activity.

The excitement over viral video advertising is easy to understand. However, uncertainty still exists about the exact mechanisms that make a viral campaign successful (Feed Company 2008; Lindstrom 2009). In an effort to be sensational, and thus achieve viral success, advertisers run the risk of becoming so unconventional that they trigger negative reactions from viewers (Eckler and Rodgers 2011). It seems that the common wisdom in designing viral video campaigns is to make the content surpass the standards for what is socially acceptable in traditional television advertising (Lindstrom 2009). However, research on edgier, highly emotional content, such as sex appeal and more extreme humor, in television advertising documents the risk of interfering with effective brand communication (Kellaris and Cline 2007; Severn, Belch, and Belch 1990). Thus, striking a balance between highly creative, emotionally engaging content and effective brand communication could be even more tenuous in producing viral video ads than for traditional television advertising.

Insight into designing viral video content that enhances rather than interferes with effective brand communication is most likely to come from systematic research on how people mentally process and evaluate viral videos. Ad producers, in the process of creating edgier, more emotionally arousing and intense content, may not completely understand how it affects fundamental motivational and emotional processes that, in turn, may affect brand communication effectiveness and the success of a viral video. Decades of advertising research have demonstrated the significant impact of human motivation and emotion on the processing of advertisements that do not feature content that is as emotionally intense as viral videos (for a recent review, see Poels and Dewitte 2006). Viral videos have the potential to engage even more complex and intense motivational and emotional processes than traditional advertising, and therefore the motivated processing of viral videos is a phenomenon advertising researchers need to explore. The current study takes an initial step toward filling this need. We investigate the experience of viewing viral videos from a motivated cognition theoretical framework through an experiment that examines the impact of emotional tone on attitude toward the ad, attitude toward the brand, and intent to forward.

Literature Review

Viral Advertising

Watching videos online is a mainstream activity; seven in ten adult Internet users (69%) have used the Internet to watch or download videos (Purcell 2010)-including watching video clips, television shows, or movies online; visiting a video-sharing site such as YouTube and Google Video; or downloading video files. The use of sharing sites is most notable for its "exploding popularity": The share of adult Internet users who watch videos almost doubled from 33% in December 2006 to 61% in June 2009 (Purcell 2010).

Brands and their advertising agencies are increasingly adding viral videos to their strategies. In a survey of 40 executives at top U.S. ad agencies and media buying firms, the majority (72.1%) reported that their clients were interested or very interested in using viral video as part of their marketing campaigns, and 86% had created at least one video in the first eight months of 2008 (Feed Company 2008). On an international scale, Lindstrom (2009) reports that nearly one-third of all brands worldwide have tried the viral video approach. This ad format has drawn so much attention that in March 2009 Advertising Age began publishing a weekly chart of the 10 most popular viral videos.

Regardless of its growing popularity, much confusion still remains about this relatively new ad format. Perhaps the most important question is one of definition. Some researchers use the terms "viral marketing" and "viral advertising" interchangeably (Kaikati and Kaikati 2004; MindComet 2006; Shirky 2000), whereas others treat them differently (Eckler and Rodgers 2010; Golan and Zaidner 2008; Porter and Golan 2006). Golan and Zaidner (2008) consider viral marketing a broader framework that encompasses a wide array of electronic word-of-mouth strategies aimed to encourage brand-related online peer-to-peer communication. They stipulate that this definition will continue