#1 “Will it Blend?” (2006) This is our top pick for the best viral marketing campaign. Started with a $50 budget that created a highly popular Internet sensation that resulted in a large increase in their product sales. Blendtec’s “will it blend?” video series shows Tom Dickson, the Blendtec founder, testing if various household items will blend in their super-powerful blender.

Creative: According to a WSJ article, in 2006, Blendtec hired George Wright, their first Director of Marketing. Tom noticed that there was sawdust on the floor in their product demonstration room. They were testing their commercial blenders by blending 2-by-2s. This sparked the idea of the “Will it blend?” videos. According to Wright, “We wanted to make sure we had was something that I would look at and think it was funny, and I would forward to my friends. We put on a lab coat and safety glasses to give it the real test thing like Bill Nye the Science Guy and the Diet Coke / Mentos guys.”

Marketing objectives: This was about creating brand awareness. This was a company with less than $40 million in annual revenue that didn’t even have a marketing department before 2006. They wanted to expand their customer base beyond the commercial market and drive increased revenues.

Results: Starting with a $50 budget for the initial video production, they used Chief Executive Tom Dickson to star in the videos. Within a week, the “Will It Blend?” videos hit it big on video-sharing site YouTube.com. According to e-consultancy, more than 8 million YouTube visitors have watched the videos. Traffic to the company’s website has increased by 650% since the introduction of the videos, while Blendtec’s online sales have increased five-fold.

#2 Hotmail (1996) Hotmail is the classic example of a viral campaign used to build a business.  This was the first viral product of the internet age. Hotmail launched their free email service in July 1996. Within 18 months they had grown to 12,000,000 registered users. Every single email sent by Hotmail user included a small ad that promoted the service in the footer.

Creative: On July 4, 1996 Hotmail founders Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia launched a , free web based email service. They started with just $300,000 in venture capital funding. They gave away free e-mail addresses and email services. Attached to the footer of each outgoing email they attached a signature file that read:  “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com.” They stood back and let the people using their network spread their offer to friends and associates.

Marketing Objective: How does a free email service make money? They make their revenue from the advertising on the website where users login. To be successful they need lots of traffic. In the first 18 months, Hotmail spent just $500K on branding, marketing, advertising and promotion with their viral marketing approach. Compare this to $20 million spent by Juno, Hotmail’s closest competitor who ended up with just a fraction of the number of users.

Results: By spending $500K in the first 18 months of operations, Hotmail recruited 12,000,000 users. By 2004 this grew to 65 million. Hotmail was purchased by Microsoft for $400 million and became part of its MSN network.

#3 Stolen Nascar (TaxBrain.com) (2006). TaxBrain.com, the online tax preparation service, hired actors to fake the theft of a race car and made it look real, so real that it was picked up and inadvertently aired as a real news story, the subsequent fall-out created a tidal wave of publicity valued at well over 1 million dollars.

Creative: Promoting a tax preparation website can be pretty boring. Marketers behind this stunt wanted to grab attention with something that had never been done before. Their research showed that a NASCAR race car had never been stolen by a racing fan and taxbrain.com did sponsor a NASCAR race car. So using actors, models and stuntmen, they did just that, the winning vehicle was stolen right from the winners circle.

Marketing Objective: The goal was to create off-season brand awareness for TaxBrain.com in a market dominated by two the industry giants: Intuit and H&R Block. They wanted to target the main demographic which is young male and female adults 18-25. This demographic is very at home online, so a viral video was selected as a way to reach this segment. TaxBrain.com hired actors to fake the theft of a race car and make it look real

Results: The story looked so real that San Francisco’s KGO-TV aired this as a real news item. ESPN then picked this up and played it over and over. This was then replayed on all the major networks and the then-16-year-old driver was asked to appear on “Good Morning America”. It is estimated that they received more than $1.8 million in TV time. This spilled over to high website visitor traffic and YouTube viewings.

Although TaxBrain.com produced this viral video exclusively for user-generated video sites such as YouTube.com, the accidental airing as a real news story catapulted this video into one of the great viral marketing successes.

#4 The Burger King Subservient Chicken (2004). “Get chicken just the way you like it” is the tagline that greets visitors on the Burger King Subservient Chicken website. This is an elaborate interactive video-based site that allowed people to type in commands that controls the chicken.

Creative: Burger King was looking for advertising that was edgy and cool. Visitors will find a person in a chicken suit, standing in the middle of what looks to be a somewhat low budget looking living room. Start off by typing “riverdance” or “throw pillows.” The chicken has a repertoire of about 300 actions, each triggered by the entry of one or more words programmed into its “vocabulary.” Try “moonwalk”, “lay egg”, “elephant”, “walk like an Egyptian”, “shake that booty” or “do the YMCA”.

Marketing Objective: The target is for young adults in their 20s and 30s. These are people that are very Internet savvy,” says Blake Lewis, a spokesman for Burger King. “They are very active. They may not mirror a lot of the traditional TV, newspaper or radio consumption patterns that older adults have come to adopt.” This project was a collaboration of the agency Crispin Porter, Bogusky and the Barbarian Group.

Results: This is quite possibly the most successful marketing website of all time. According to the Barbarian Group the website had over one hundred million unique visitors. Sales of Burger King’s chicken sandwiches doubled in a matter of weeks of the website going online. The website was launched in true viral fashion… only 20 people were told about it and all were friends of people who worked at the ad agency. In the first year The “Subservient Chicken” website was visited by about 14 million unique visitors and the average visitor spent six minutes commanding the chicken.

#5 “Evolution” The Dove Self esteem Fund (2006) This video shows how perceptions of beauty can be manipulated and not real. This gives a time lapsed look at an ordinary woman being made up and then Photoshopped to produce a glamour shot for a billboard. The Dove campaign for real beauty was launched by Unilever as part of the expansion of the Dove brand from soaps  to health and beauty products in general.

Creative: The video says this is not real, you will never look this good, and neither did she. Ogilvy & Mather, Toronto, used time-lapse photography to show the transformation of an average woman into a glamorous billboard model using beauty stylists and Photoshop enhancements. The clip was released under the slogan ‘No wonder our perception of real beauty is distorted’

Marketing Objective: The Dove viral ad was unique because it was also raising money for a positive purpose, the Dove Self-Esteem Fund, a program that helps educate and inspire girls on a wider definition of beauty. They created the Dove Self Esteem Fund with the goal of positively affecting the lives of 5 million girls globally by the year 2010.

The people at Dove observed a societal problem – self esteem in women – particularly body image issues in young women. They validated it with their own research and learned that only 2% of women feel beautiful. 94% of young women want to change some aspect of how they look.

Results: With over 15 million viewings on YouTube, “Evolution,” has already been a tremendous success. This “Evolution” viral ad for Dove has won one of the most prestigious advertising awards in the world - the Grand Prix for viral marketing at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

#6 Terry Tate – Office Linebacker (2003) Originally released as a 2003 Super Bowl commercial, Terry Tate is the office enforcer. Fictional character Terry Tate brings his football playbook to the office to deal with issues such as office etiquette and productivity. Reebok was successful in forging an emotional contact with its audience to make their brand memorable.

Creative: Terry Tate, football linebacker, is recruited by Felcher and Sons to keep the staff on task and to enforce office behavior. The moment someone is distracted by idle chitchat or selfish behavior, Terry Tate appears out of left field and tackles the problem.

Marketing Objective: Rawson Thurber, a USC film school graduate, created Tate and presented the idea to Reebok.  According to Marc Fireman, Reebok’s director of interactive marketing; Reebok was interested in the idea and found the character creative and funny. The company was looking for something that would appeal and relate to the brand’s target audience of 18- to 34-year-old males. The objective for the original Super Bowl ad was to create Buzz and drive people to the Reebok website.

Results: The combination of product name and aggressive imagery branded Reebok with the hard-hitting power that they wanted for their football-crazed consumers. No other commercial captured the essence of Super Bowl Sunday back in 2003. It was funny, smart, original and memorable during a boring blowout game.

Reebok released three more short films, shown exclusively on the Web, spacing them out by about two to five weeks each. A day and a half into the campaign, the number of films downloaded from the site had already exceeded Hypnotic’s original guarantee of approximately 700,000 downloads. The first year, the campaign produced over 20 million viewings.

#7 VeriSign’s “Cart Whisperer” (2008) This video is a spoof about a man who can “talk” to abandoned shopping carts. This video creates a connection between the common supermarket shopping cart and the ones we use online. Abandoned shopping carts are a real problem for online retailers.

VeriSign provides a range of security and identity protection products that help retailers establish and maintain trust with consumers who shop online.

Creative: In this humorous video “Liberty Fillmore” rounds up lost abandoned shopping carts. Filmore is a fictional character whose unusual communication skills have earned him the nickname “The Cart Whisperer. In the video he “rescues” an abandoned shopping cart from a weed-choked parking lot and leads it back home to a shopping center.

Marketing Objective: VeriSign aimed the campaign at highlighting the pain companies experience as they try to understand why consumers fill online shopping carts, only to abandon them before buying. The goal of the campaign was to create awareness of how visible site security can prevent online shopping cart abandonment.

“This campaign was designed to create a powerful visual metaphor for something that most people are familiar with, but think very little about — an abandoned shopping cart — and associate it with a company that billions of Internet users and businesses rely on every day,” said Marianna Peyzner, SSL product marketing manager at VeriSign.

The campaign was a brainchild of VeriSign, and creative giant McCann Erickson. The team launched the campaign by seeding the video on YouTube and in media player applications and widgets on Facebook pages and various blogs. A teaser video banner also ran on sites to drive VeriSign’s core target audience to the campaign.

Results: On the day of its release, it was the second most viewed video on YouTube. Since its introduction in February 2008, the Cart Whisperer videos have been viewed over 4 million times on YouTube alone. It’s too early to assess the campaign’s potential business impact for Verisign.

#8 Diet Coke / Mentos (2006) This started as an experiment by Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz. They set off 101 bottles of Diet Coke using over 500 Mentos. This video was not sponsored or planned by Coca Cola or Mentos. The two experimenters posted the video on their website, www.eepybird.com. By the end of the first day, viewers started pouring in, at a rate of 1,000 an hour. To date there have been 10 million to 20 million viewers on the Internet. Nobody is sure of the exact count.

What happens when you combine 200 liters of Diet Coke and over 500 Mentos mints? It’s amazing and entertaining to watch. It brings out the child in all of us. This is the home video that started as a backyard experiment and became a cultural phenomenon. The video even won the Webby Award for best in viral phenomena and was nominated for an Emmy Award for outstanding broadband content.

Unlike most other viral marketing videos, none of this was sponsored by the company whose products were featured. In this case, Coke or Perfetti Van Melle USA (makers of Mentos). Unlike Mentos, Coke was not excited… at least not at first.

This is an excerpt from a Business Week article: “Initially, we didn’t have anything to do with the Diet Coke/Mentos video, but the next thing you know it’s on the talk shows and all over the Internet,” says Tim Kopp, vice president of global interactive marketing at Coca-Cola. “It [meaning viral marketing] will happen with you or without you,” says Kopp. “It was a chance for us to point a spotlight at them.”

Today the website www.eepybird.com is sponsored by Coke and OfficeMax. Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz have done World tours doing demonstrations. They have set and broken their own official Guinness World Record for Diet Coke & Mentos. So what is next? The Extreme Sticky Note Experiments video has been released just this month and is being sposored by OfficeMax.

#9 Gorilla -Cadbury (2007 / 2008): This campaign is designed to promote Cadbury Dairy Milk brand chocolate within the United Kingdom and Ireland. This ad was first launched August 31, 2007. A version of the commercial was uploaded to video YouTube and received 500,000 page views in the first week. TellyAds named the Cadbury gorilla commercial the favorite TV ad for 2007 (Britain).

Viral marketing describes a marketing strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth and exposure. This is our #9 pick in our top 10 picks for the all time best viral marketing campaigns.

There is no question that the viral video became wildly popular, but many feel there was little connection to the brand or the product.

Marketing Strategy: According to video creators, the drumming gorilla is an effort to make you smile, in exactly the same way Cadbury Dairy Milk does. The media coverage was so great that this helped explain the ad to the general public! The Gorilla’s drumming is supposed to be “a visual metaphor for the joy of eating a bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk”.

The campaign itself was much more than a viral marketing video. It was made up of appearances on billboards, print newspapers and magazines, television and cinema spots, event sponsorships and an internet presence.

After the first or second viewings, many cannot recall what brand name is associated with the video.  But British polling company YouGov reported public perception of the brand had noticeably improved in the period following the launch, reversing the decline experienced in the first half of 2007.

Results: Sure, the Cadbury ads are memorable, but do they sell? According to the recent Biggest Brands survey by TBS the Cadbury Dairy Milk lost market share while competitor Galaxy grew 12% over the prior year. So the effectiveness of the campaign is questionable.

#10 The Blair Witch Project (1999): This is one of the most effective viral/guerrilla marketing campaigns ever.  This film cost just $22,000 to produce and grossed $248 million worldwide. This film was in the Guinness Book of World Records for “Top Budget: Box Office Ratio” (for a mainstream feature film).

Viral marketing describes a marketing strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential and exposure. These are our top 10 picks for the all time best viral marketing campaigns.

The movie: In October 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary… A year later their footage was found. They had left to film a documentary about the local legend known as Blair Witch.

The result: A couple of young film students created a major movie hit. They accomplished this with almost no budget, with no script, with unknowns acting, directing and producing the movie. And to top it off they used very little film, they used videotape.

How they did it: The marketing behind the Blair Witch Project was powerful. Hale and Monello (the creators of the Blair Witch Project) made us question whether this film was “truth or myth”. To create a buzz they used various Internet sites to feed the audience bits and pieces of the Blair Witch mythology. There were bits and pieces of information such as police reports, and lost pages from the missing student’s diaries.

Although only $22,000 was spent producing the movie, Artisan reportedly spent $10 million on distribution and promotion. This is a small figure by Hollywood standards where $25-30 million is more the norm for high profile films. The Blair Witch Project has become one of the most profitable films in history.

They used Internet hype to help create excitement. Unlike other hit movies, the Internet activity started well before the film’s release. MTV News covered the proliferation of fan sites nearly two months before its July 16 release. There were blogs, fan websites, web boards, and trailer sites. The films website generated 75 million visits the week of the film’s release. Nielson NetRatings listed the official site as the 45th most visited location on the Web for the week ending August 1.