When viral spreads disease

Gotta love it when a fancy-pants ambient stunt 'goes viral'...but not quite as planned.

Marketing types should have learned not to play with urban fire (aka graffiti) after the PSP debacle a couple of years back.

The highest profile word-of-mouth balls-up of recent weeks has been Ask.com's Information Revolution campaign. Its backfiring has less to do with ill-conceived wall scribblings and more to do with the fact that Ask.com (the brand whose ambassador used to be a butler) never was and never is going to start an Information Revolution - especially not one that consumers have no appetite for. (Most people want more of Google's genuinely revolutionary applications, not less.)

Painful landing page copy like this doesn't help the Ask.com cause:

"Welcome, person of courage... [cue lots of whinging about Google without actually saying the G word] we've been forced to go underground [what, TV and poster advertising and a crappy microsite?] to get the word out about Ask.com. No one said it would be easy [damn right, and you've failed miserably]. We're glad you could join us [sorry, I only came here to gloat]. Information Revolution Now!"

The cod-soviet grammar of that last sentence is brilliant. Give that man a Lion.

Changing tack slightly, it seems that marketers aren't the only people struggling to meet the challenge posed by P2P distribution. The Onion reports that some of the more serious jounalists at the NY Times were shocked and upset to discover that the newspaper's online readers tend to pass on articles about sex, animals and sex with animals much more than they do stories about Iraq and gender politics:

"I thought my Elizabeth Edwards breast cancer article the other week had a great chance, as it was at the intersection of politics, health, death, and family—and had the word 'breast' in the headline—but it didn't even make the top 10," Nagourney said. "Whatever."

So, what have we learnt about viral? Well, don't try to do it. Don't worry about it. Instead, just focus on making interesting stuff and making it shareable. Blog-happy Diginatives and their bulging Gmail addressbooks will do the rest.

Marketers can never own viral: it's not a medium, it's a mode of distribution, which by its very nature can't be controlled. That doesn't preclude us from observing and learning from it, though. Viral transmission is real behaviour, not reported behaviour. The contents and scale of that transmission comprise a dip-test for the digital age.