Viral Marketing

The textbook defines viral marketing as "a strategy to get consumers to share a marketer's message, often through email or online videos, in a way that spreads dramatically and quickly."  This type of marketing advertises for a product or service, makes it easily accessible to many, and utilizes existing networks (YouTube has helped increase popularity tremendously).  Here's some examples of viral marketing successes:

Hotmail:

Hotmail was one of the first web emails offered for free.  It was started in 1996 and advertised at the bottom of each email "Get your free email at Hotmail".  By December of 1997, there was more than 8.5 million subscribers and was sold to Microsoft for $400 million.  Successful marketing to say the least.

Dove Evolution
This commercial shows a woman being made up for a commercial then being Photo-shopped, sending a message about self esteem and the reality of advertisements we see in magazines and on billboards.  The first day it was released, it racked up 44,000 views and currently almost has 15 million.  It won the most prestigious award for advertising, and was talked about on shows such as "The View", "The Ellen DeGeneres Show", and "Good Morning America".  The clip had generated millions of dollars in free advertising just from word of mouth.

The Blair Witch Project
This movie was released in 1999, and it's commercials helped create hype for it's release.  At the end, it advertised for an internet site, which still exists today.  It features a timeline for the happenings of the blair witch and even has a picture of the filmmakers with a caption saying it was taken a week before they disappeared; combined with the filming style made it seem it actually could be a true story and it became a popular film, gaining popularity by word of mouth and the advertisements.  Just the commercial has over 2 million hits on YouTube.