December 1996 was the year that Harvard School professor Jeffrey F. Rayport wrote an article entitled The Virus of Marketing for Fast Company. This was the first time that the term Viral Marketing first came to the public consciousness prior to becoming the key descriptive word used to describe Hotmail’s method of including advertising in the email sent by its users. The idea for viral marketing is somewhat based on science and computer technology. Science in the sense that a virus is something that unconsciously spreads among people while the computer technology aspect comes in the form of viral marketing being a Trojan horse of sorts. It infects your system and spreads itself among the users without anybody realizing it until the whole system is infected and has spread among users far and wide. That explains how Viral Marketing was conceived and developed. The question now is, what makes it work so well in today’s world so that much more advertising is done via the viral method than any other system of advertising?
In this 21st century, viral marketing has been used to describe how the internet has changed the way marketing and advertising is done. With the advent of social networking websites such as multiply.com, facebook, my space, etc., the chances for advertisers to reach their niche market and use the service users to spread the word about their products have increased a thousand fold. In the early days, viral marketing was known as word of mouth marketing because of the way people would recommend services and brands to each other. These days, viral marketing is everywhere. Most specifically, viral marketing proliferates in our free email accounts and social networking pages. The idea being that people will “voluntarily” spread the word about marketing ploys. These Viral marketing campaigns often masquerade as video clips, interactive flash games, ebooks, free software offers, or more recently advergames. An advergame is an internet based interactive game created solely for the purpose of advertising the sponsors product. Some of the companies that have used the advergame method of viral marketing are Coca-Cola, Nike, and Visa card. Such advertising campaigns are successful because it effectively targets, seeks out, and attracts the product’s niche demographic market.