popular thinking

VIRAL ADS/WATCHMECHANGE.COM: My story on the viral ad craze, as exemplified by the Gap's watchmechange.com campaign this summer, ran on page 2 of today's Boston Herald with screen captures of the animated striptease. That's the good news. Bad news, my story was supposed to run Sunday, when it had more space, but got bumped and cut. Ugh.

Many thanks, though, to Steve Hall at Adrants. Check out his site.

But first...

Dancing Baby, the Ally McBeal hallucination that became a favorite online time-waster of the 1990s, has grown up and become a striptease spokesmodel for the Gap.
Well, sort of.
The hottest new "viral ad'' to make the e-mail rounds, the Gap's watchmechange.com garnered 360,000 unique visitors in its first week online last month. Gap has not released updated stats, but the ad has generated a lot of attention for the Gap brand.
The site lets viewers pick an animated male or female model, modify the hairstyle, weight, build and even chest size, and pick out a Gap outfit. At that point the model does a striptease, enters a dressing room and comes out wearing the new look.
The tagline: "Change. It Feels Good. GAP.''
It's a "mildly amusing'' site, according to Steve Hall, Groton-based publisher of Adrants.com, a leading site for advertising criticism. "They're trying to, in a humorous way, show the clothes, have a little fun, and in that respective way, it works.''
It's even more amusing when the model sports a unibrow, soul patch, mohawk, 'fro or mullet.
Credit Crispin Porter & Bogusky, the Miami agency responsible for last year's Burger King "subservient chicken'' site, which let users manipulate a person in a chicken suit. That site generated more than 12 million Web visitors one day in April.
So-called viral advertising has spread like a virus across corporate America.
Online videos of the Dancing Baby, the Star Wars kid, the Numa Numa guy or JibJab's election farce caught on with computer users because they were amusing, and corporations have co-opted this marketing method.
"All of a sudden, the creative has become much more unexpected, and much funnier,'' said Jeff Benjamin, Crispin Porter's interactive creative director. "Let's come up with something that we'd want to tell our friends about at the watercooler.''
But Hall wondered whether viral ads produce direct results.
"That was the big question with Subservient Chicken. Did it sell any sandwiches?'' he asked.

Benjamin did answer that question -- yes, albeit indirectly. He told me that people might not have run out of the house after seeing the viral ad to buy a chicken sandwich, but that sometime down the road (so to speak), they'd pass by a BK and remember the ad fondly enough to make an impulse buy. Failing that, they'd at least think of BK in a more positive light and pass the ad along to the friends via e-mail.

The next wave to keep an eye out for is podcasting. I asked Benjamin about viral podcast ads. He said they'd certainly make them, but they haven't yet. Just waiting on that brilliant idea to launch it. So stay tuned.

In the meantime...
-- Numa Numa Dance
-- Many variations on the Star Wars Kid, here and here
-- JibJab videos
-- the original Dancing Baby

My story's site: Gap's new 'viral' ads take off – literally (Boston Herald)