Viral Marketing Sensations

We have all seen many examples of  viral marketing success. The dove campaign with the chick putting on make up and T-mobile with the flash mob signing if thats what its called. I have always felt like these videos are definitely a great success for these comapnies at minimal cost but do the millions and millions of views actually turn into noticble profit gains? I never really though about it until I saw that T-Mobile had one of the most successful viral marketing campaings ever and if you haven't seen the news lately they are about to be bought by ATT. Now I am sure that there were many other problems affecting the company internaly and extarnaly but if that was one of the most successful viral campaigns ever then why are they being bought a little over a year later? So how exactly does viral succs translate? I mean maybe I'm alonet here  but I have seen where the hell is Matt video a couple of times but I never think about purchasing stride gum because of it. Viral marketing is not free either. It still takes alot of time and money but in most cases less money.Still its a hefty investment. The one question I would ask is whether or not that money could be more benifical to the bottom line if spent elsewhere? 

The Big Dance Effect

As everyone is aware of, unless you live Turkmenistan, the NCAA tournament starts this Thursday and sport fans of every caliber are getting excited. As you know the most exciting thing about the tournament is filling out the brackets. whether you know anything or nothing about college basketball everyone fills out a bracket to try and pick the champion of  the tournament. The buzz is always in the air and gone are the days where the sports fanatic has to wait for the next day paper to fill  out get their bracket and fill it out. Now as soon as the picks are finished the brackets are up on multiple online outlets. Sites such as ESPN, CBS Sports and FOX sports to name a few. I do not know the numbers but i can imagine that there are millions of hits in a matter of less than an hour. With all of this traffic what does that do for the online media marketing campaigns. Is the NCAA tournament the online superbowl when it comes add space? With millions of people going to these sites at one time and the number of participants growing each year, how much will a 4x11/2 add costs marketers and how much will marketers be willing to spend.