Back in February, Evan Davis and the Today programme team challenged viral marketing agency Rubber Republic to make a viral campaign to test the concept of viral marketing. Inspired by a number of successful brand virals (including Cadbury’s Dancing Eyebrows advertisement that did the rounds not long ago), the Today programme is running an experiment to see if Rubber Republic can make Evan, Jon, Jim and the whole gang go viral.

The final result went live on YouTube today:

On its own merits, it’s a fun little clip and worth a watch – especially for regular listeners who are familiar with all the personalities involved. Having picked it up from Twitter this morning, I sent it straight around the office, and on to friends and family who I knew would appreciate it. So, I guess in that sense, it is a good viral.

However, measuring its success as a stand alone viral will be tricky. For starters, they announced that it had gone live on this morning’s programme, which makes it impossible to discern whether any subsequent YouTube views are a result of that broadcast, or of having been passed the link virally.

Evan Davis suggested that Today would herald the project a success once the clip found its way back to the Today show’s inbox – but when you broadcast this live on air, how can such communication truly be the result of viral marketing, and not just fans of the show wanting to be the first to send the link back to Today?

Which points to another difficulty in measuring the project’s success: how many people sent on the clip for its genuine viral qualities (funny, worth sharing etc.), and how many forwarded it simply to be part of the experiment or, for those in the marketing industry, to share with colleagues the latest example of viral marketing?

In other words, by overtly referencing the fact that their viral content is part of a viral marketing experiment, have Today and Rubber Republic rendered the viral quality of that content obsolete? Hence making it impossible to measure its effect?

But then again, does any of this actually matter? Surely the whole point of the exercise was to get Today talked about, and to potentially reach a new audience of more social-media-savvy (and therefore potentially younger) listeners by engaging with blogs, Twitter and YouTube to convey a slice of Today humour.

Ultimately, my main question would be: has this engaged anyone who didn’t previously listen to the show? Would anyone unfamiliar with Today‘s personalities actually see the humour in the clip, or see any relevance to make it worthy of sending to their like-minded friends?

I’m not convinced.

By Lucie Bartlett on March 11th, 2009

Tags: Radio, Social Media, Viral Marketing, YouTube

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