Whilst I always listen to Radio 4’s Today programme on my drive to the station in the morning, this means that I only hear it up till about 8am. It would seem that today this meant that I missed an item on, of all things, ‘viral video’, something I became aware of via Today’s Twitter profile (a sign of the times if ever there was one).

I’m not quite sure of the full details but it seems as if Today decided to conduct an experiment in viral marketing by making a ‘viral video’. Reaction to the video, which is mildly amusing, has so far been reasonably positive. However Mike Butcher, editor of TechCrunch UK, was less than complimentary:

@r4today Actually, the Radio 4 Today “viral” vid is anything but. You pimped it on the damn show for pete’s sake. FAIL.

However, his real vitriol was reserved for Rubber Republic, the company who made the video:

@Rubber_Republic Your test of “crossover of broadcast radio and socially shared media” is not “viral”. FAIL.

Now, whilst Mike is almost certainly a little harsh, he does have a point. Because at the end of the day, what Rubber Republic have done is create a video, not a viral.

We’ve obviously had quite a lot of success at creating things that did go viral, taking on lives of their own and spreading far wider than we ever could have hoped (I’m thinking the Lenovo Tapes, dothetest, 24), and we even get asked to come and talk about this very subject. However, we could have told Radio 4, if they had asked, that you simply can not create a ‘viral’. It’s impossible.

What you can do, is create a great piece of content, work really hard to market it to the right people, and cross your fingers that it starts to spread itself. Virals are only created in hindsight.

The other thing that we would have told them (other than that it would have been better if the video had been hosted on a YouTube profile other than the one belonging to the company that made it) is that virals don’t have to be video.

Some of the most successful viral campaigns have had nothing to do with video or YouTube: the 40% discount voucher for Thresher that was launched by Hugh McLeod of gapingvoid was nothing more than something for people to print off that he promoted on his blog, whilst Hotmail’s success was down to the fact that at the bottom of every email was a link encouraging people to sign up – viral was built into the product’s DNA.

Despite all of this, I have to say that I like the video and hope it does well. Whilst there may be no such thing as a truly viral piece of marketing (else it wouldn’t need to be marketed) there is such a thing as good marketing, and I think that this is exactly that.

UPDATE: Soon after posting this I received a lovely email from Andy Parkhouse, a director at Team Rubber (the parent company of Rubber Republic). As we’re still having issues with our comments, I’ve posted the builk of Andy’s email below (with his permission, natch).

Nice balanced response to our Today ‘viral’.  We should have avoided calling it a viral – in our view it was always a charming little film intended to appeal to a good cross-section of existing Today programme listeners.

It’s too easy to use the wrong terms – for lots of people ‘viral’ = ‘film on the internet’, for others it’s holy grail of ‘free marketing that everyone will love’ (which we haven’t seen anyone achieve with a commercial ‘viral’ in ten years of doing this).

We should know better.

Header image by João Pedro, uai!

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