A Web Contagion

First, came the chicken. Then, it hatched hundreds of ideas.

In April 2004, Burger King was trying to rekindle its “Have it your way” slogan and promote its chicken sandwiches. In addition to standard 30-second television commercials, ad agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky also prepared a so-called viral campaign for the Web.

Viral ads -- also called pass-along ads -- spread by word of mouse: The goal is to make the ads so funny, charming, sexy, or controversial that viewers e-mail them to friends or post them on websites.

At www.subservientchicken.com, a cheap Web camera reveals a person in a chicken costume standing in a dingy living room. The chicken responds to typed commands, such as “tap dance,” “take a bow” or “do push-ups.” (Naughty requests are denied with a wagging wing.)

The website, which hardly mentions Burger King, has been visited more than 442 million times -- an average of 10 hits a second. In the 17 months since the Subservient Chicken debuted, dozens of the world’s biggest marketers have scrambled to replicate its success and take advantage of the Internet’s unique ability to move messages cheaply and quickly from person to person.

Some of the smaller ones who can’t afford much TV advertising also are giving viral a shot.

The Subservient Chicken and other pass-along commercials had persuaded Chris Lombardo, founder of Red Guitar Advertising Studios in Newbury Park, to experiment with the new medium. The product being pitched: the gleaming exhaust systems from Borla Performance Industries Inc., Red Guitar’s long-time client.

Alyse Borla, the Oxnard manufacturer’s director of advertising and promotions, had received and sent several viral ads that made her laugh, and she imagined a Borla commercial worming through cyberspace forever.

On TV, “when the show’s over, it’s over,” she said. “This can just keep going on and on.”

And spending is going up, people knowledgeable about the business say.

Online advertising generated $9.6 billion in revenue last year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. That’s only 6% of all advertising dollars, but it’s growing fast. The stealthy nature of viral advertising on the Web -- marketers depend on the consumer to do their work for them -- makes it impossible to measure in dollar amounts, but advertising executives say it’s becoming increasingly popular among major brand names as they adopt the Internet as an advertising platform.

Anheuser-Busch Co., New Line Cinema, Gap Inc., Purina and even paper towel and toilet tissue makers are creating commercials that live only on the Web. These campaigns find audiences among Web surfers -- especially young people and enthusiast groups such as car buffs -- who don’t mind killing a little time with ads they find compelling.

“Advertisers have realized that there is this receptiveness on the Web, at least among certain groups, to opening themselves to ad messages as long as those messages are going to provide them with a little bit of joy,” said Patti Williams, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

That’s becoming increasingly important as the rise in cable TV, video games and the Internet reduces the time people spend in front of one TV channel or newspaper. Also, technologies such as TiVo make it easier than ever to skip commercials.

Recent viral video efforts include Budweiser with frogs that sing and dance, Angel Soft toilet paper with “bathroom moments,” Long John Silver’s restaurants with a road-tripping shrimp, Purina with Snowball the French bulldog in “Confessions of a Self-Admitted Pooper” and Victoria’s Secret with a strip poker game.

“We’re all looking for the next Subservient Chicken,” said Aaron Sugarman, New Line’s vice president of interactive marketing.

New Line came close with a recent campaign for the comedy “Wedding Crashers,” about two friends who charm their way into strangers’ weddings. The idea: Let people crash the film trailer. People could upload head shots, then replace the movie stars’ faces with their own.

Fans also created trailers pairing President Bush with a sex offender, Karl Rove with Valerie Plame, Tom Cruise with Katie Holmes and one billionaire co-founder of Google Inc. with another.

According to New Line executives, since the promotion’s launch on July 21, Web surfers have created more than 130,000 trailers, which have been watched more than 2 million times.

Marketers like viral videos because they’re relatively cheap. They only have to pay to produce the video, not to buy air time. News Corp.’s Fox television network, for instance, charges as much as $613,000 to broadcast a 30-second spot during “American Idol,” according to research firm Nielsen Monitor-Plus.

But there are no guarantees. Advertisers are still figuring out how to measure success in this new medium. They puzzle over why one spot spreads across the Web like wildfire, while others burn out.

Marketer Joseph Jaffe says viral ads can be funny, patriotic, heartwarming, gossipy or bizarre. But they can’t be boring or sell too strongly. “People are very tuned into the fact that whatever you forward to your e-mail list says something about you,” he wrote in his book, “Life After the 30-Second Spot.” “And hardly anyone would ever send a salesman over to a friend’s house.”

Part of the appeal of viral ads is their novelty. As they proliferate, some worry that the Web will become so clogged that weary consumers will simply stop watching and sending them to friends. According to surveys done in October by Jupiter Research, 34% of marketers had tried a viral advertising campaign in the previous 12 months. But during the same period only 10% of consumers surveyed had forwarded an e-mail as a result of seeing an ad.

“Ninety percent of them are bad,” said P.J. Pereira, executive director of AKQA, an interactive ad agency that has created viral spots for such products as Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox video game console. “The challenge is to keep finding a compelling reason to make you send it to your friend, because the more we do, the more resistant people get. It’s exactly like a virus; we have to find a stronger virus to send.”

There’s another risk in training consumers to forward these types of ads: Sometimes they backfire. Two car ads created as jokes -- one of a cat being decapitated by a Ford sunroof and another of a Volkswagen muffling the blast of a suicide bomber -- sparked outcries when they got loose on the Web.

Borla, the exhaust-systems manufacturer, knew all the risks of viral marketing online, but decided to go ahead anyway.

After years of advertising in magazines such as Motor Trend and Car and Driver, Alyse Borla, who started the company in 1978 with her husband, Alex, said the relatively low cost of a viral campaign enticed her to try it. At $12,000 to $15,000, it was about the cost of one full-page magazine ad.

“It has to be good for it to work,” Borla said. “But at least with this, if you lay an egg it’s not going to bury you. It’s not, ‘There goes my advertising budget for the year.’ ”

So she turned to Lombardo and Red Guitar.

Late on a June evening in Oxnard, Lombardo’s cry of “action” echoed through a chilly Borla warehouse.

Elton Buonforte, a muscular actor from Italy, gazed lustfully through a staged auto-shop window at the gleaming, stainless steel Borla exhaust and daydreamed of steering a roaring Corvette through canyons.

The physical manifestation of his lust suddenly caused the glass to shatter. He groaned and sank to the floor in pain. The message that Borla equipment causes such a sexual reaction in men is would be too racy, juvenile and crass for television.

Those traits also make it perfect for the Internet.

“This could never run on U.S. TV, and if it could we’re not doing our job,” Lombardo said of the ad, dubbed “Love Hurts.”

Lombardo used to follow the advertising industry’s “back-door” principle: Try to slip in ads when the consumer can’t avoid them, such as during a TV show or in the pages of magazines. But with consumers getting better at ignoring or skipping those ads, he rebuilt his agency around a new paradigm: Give people advertising that’s so interesting, they’ll invite you in their front door.

On television, advertisers can buy spots for a price based on the number of viewers. But the advertisers don’t know whether the viewers have TiVo or whether they simply visit the kitchen or bathroom during commercials. On the Web, advertisers have software and stats that tell them how many unique visitors come to a website and how many times a video is watched. But he had no idea how many viewings would deem a video a success.

“It’s kind of a soft science,” Lombardo said.

He used a rough comparison: Sport Compact Car magazine has nearly 50,000 subscribers, and it charges $16,700 for a full-page color ad. If he could spend less than that and get more viewers, he’d call it a success.

Red Guitar shot the commercial, edited it and embedded software into the digital file so Lombardo and Borla could tell when it’s been watched start to finish. The view-counting software isn’t perfect -- it doesn’t work on Windows Media Player, which is popular -- but Lombardo hoped it would offer a rough idea of whether anyone had seen the spot.

Lombardo posted “Love Hurts” on Borla’s website on July 5 at 7:54 p.m. under the headline “Why’s this man in pain?” A photo of Buonforte grimacing invited visitors to click and find out.

Alyse Borla, Lombardo and Red Guitar staff e-mailed the video to friends to get it moving. By the next afternoon it had been watched 800 times.

Strangers began to share it. On July 6, a car enthusiast going by the online handle “OOBlackconvert” found “Love Hurts” and posted it on a Corvette Forum message board. The commercial drew kudos in three dozen replies.

Just after midnight on July 7, Lombardo sent the commercial to several websites that specialize in humorous videos, such as Kontraband.com, TTR2.com, Viralchart.com and others. Some post them for free, others accept “tracking” fees to host the spot and display how many times it’s been viewed.

By July 11, the commercial had been viewed 7,800 times. The popular site TTR2 posted it, but “Love Hurts” occupied only a small link in a long list running down the right side of the page. On Viral Chart, it had jumped from 20th to eighth. Kontraband ignored it.

The commercial was spreading slower than Lombardo would have liked, so he hired Viral Media, a consulting firm owned by the same people who run Viral Chart, to promote the spot. “They have the connections and experience to get good results,” Lombardo said.

Within a day, “Love Hurts” was gaining steam, becoming the fifth-most-watched video on Viral Chart and the websites it tracks. By the next day, July 14, it hit No. 1, with 14,100 views and an additional 7,600 on Borla.com.

On July 15, the site Eatmail.tv included the Borla spot in its weekly e-mail newsletter: “This week we received a clip we enjoyed so much that we’ve decided to pass it on.”

Lombardo’s subsequent Google searches discovered that commercial had also been posted in dozens of other car-enthusiast and general-interest websites he’d never heard of.

By Aug. 1, Lombardo was ready to call the campaign a success.

Film production cost $12,000. Building the video’s page on Borla.com with a “forward to a friend” feature cost $2,000 and can be used for future episodes. Red Guitar paid $3,000 to websites for the tracking software and seeding.

Viral Chart reported a total of 55,000 viewings, and Lombardo suspects the figure is low because some people didn’t watch all the way through and others viewed it through a media player that doesn’t support the ad-counting software. An additional 16,000 people watched the commercial on Borla.com.

It’s too early to tell whether the campaign sparked an jump in sales of Borla products, but Lombardo said that wasn’t the point.

“Love Hurts” was created to portray Borla as a hip company to young car enthusiasts and to introduce the name to people who hadn’t heard of it. He and Alyse Borla also wanted to raise the company’s cachet among the most fervent car buffs, in hopes that they will recommend Borla parts to friends.

“You’re not going to go purchase an $800 exhaust system unless you’ve done your research, and part of that research is asking people for advice,” he said. “It’s all about building brand buzz and the long-term effects of doing that.”

Bottom line: $17,000 for capturing the attention of at least 71,000 people for 30 seconds.

“I learned that it’s the future of marketing, man,” Lombardo said.