Cisco Viral Video Marketing Campaign
This is a fantastic viral marketing campaign. I found the following video at IFILM YouTube under the simple and direct title Businessman has a meltdown in hotel lobby. The video, as as you’ll see, is an entirely legitimate-looking security camera footage of a long and wince-inducing public meltdown of a businessman:
The closing domain, DontHaveAMeltDown.com, is entirely too compelling not to visit. When you reach the site, you’re greeted by a virtual life coach/psychologist explaining such fictitious ailments as Post Traumatic Beep Disorder, Getouttamyinterfacia, Saxophonia, Mono Transmission Disorder, and Schitzophonia.
After she explains these disorders, you’re taken to another video about the Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator, which, of course, solves all of the problems she had just discussed.
This viral campaign is so effective because it features compelling content that memorably illustrates problems that the product solves. It effectively balances cringing drama with lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek humor.
[…] Cisco’s “Businessman has meltdown in hotel lobby.” This convincingly real-looking video – meant to look like footage from a security camera in a hotel lobby – is equal parts hilarious and effective at convincing businesspeople of the need for Cisco’s Unified Mobile Communicator, so as to avoid epic freak-outs such as this. The video, used in conjunction with Cisco’s microsite, http://www.donthaveameltdown.com, has nearly 500,000 views on YouTube. […]
This kind of marketing technique use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet.