Wendy’s “viral” campaign on YouTube: The future of Marketing or the future of Spam?

Apparently Wendy’s is following Dell Computer’s footsteps in creating “viral videos” for distribution on video sharing sites like YouTube.

The idea is to produce humorous, amateurish videos promoting a particular brand, place them on the video sharing sites, hope they get a little traction and voila! You’ve cheaply reached hundreds of thousands of people “virally” through very little effort on the company’s part.

Greg Sterling of Search Engine Journal wrote a piece entitled “YouTube and Video Spam” where he says straight out that what Wendy’s is doing is spamming YouTube.

Tony Hung of The Blog Herald claims that Wendys is “gaming” YouTube, in essence, taking advantage of the medium to experiment “in virally related video in social media networks”.

I disagree with Greg about this effort being construed as “spamming” YouTube, as spamming implies the uninvited and unwanted marketing/advertising efforts of a company to reach you with their message through duplicitous ways. YouTube is pretty straightforward. If you like something, you watch it. If you really like it, you pass it along to your friends or post it to your blog. If hundreds of thousands of individuals willingly share this video with their friends, it ain’t spam. It’s effective viral marketing.

Is it gaming? Yes. It’s an experiment to see what results they can get.

I don’t really have a problem with this other than to say that we’re going to be seeing a WHOLE bunch of this kind of marketing in the very near future and it’s going to change our entire experience of YouTube and similar sites.

It’s like having a bunch of friends who send you those jokes or compelling stories that circulate around the emailsphere (I made that word up). At first, it’s funny and quite amusing, sometimes even interesting. (my sister in law spams my wife with this kind of stuff daily) But after awhile you say, enough already! There’s such a thing as too much of a good thing.

I remember having to politely ask a relative of mine whom I absolutely adore to take me off of her mailing list for her jokes, not because I lack a sense of humor, but I was just getting tired of all the same ol sh*t. She did, and I was quite relieved.

But imagine getting a dozen or two emailings daily promoting these videos! For god’s sake, it could get downright aggravating!

As it stands, we all encounter way too many marketing messages every single minute of our lives. Imagine having a deluge of viral marketing videos engulfing you on top of all that!

Yikes!