The Winner:
Forget-Me-Not Panties

The USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review provides an in-depth, extensive look into the recently concluded Contagious Media Showdown competition. The joint project with art/science nonprofit Eyebeam sought to discover, through a contest to see which viral videos attract the most web traffic and blog links, what accounts for and drives "viralness." For the OJR piece, Mark Glaser conducted an interview with ContagiousMedia.org publisher and R&D director of Eyebeam, Jonah Peretti and writes that the winners may now seem obvious - but the winning strategies are not.

The winners were Forget-Me-Not Panties (women's underwear with built-in GPS tracking for jealous males), Crying While Eating (people doing exactly that) and Ringtone Dancer (a caped crusader who dances to a ringtone in public), in that order, with Blogebrity - a magazine about A-list bloggers - winning the Technorati prize for most blog links.

What set those sites and videos apart from the rest is still under study. But certainly there's humor, unreality and exaggeration, provocation and controversy. The question is whether online marketers and publishers can learn from contagious/viral media, because marketers tend to stick with what they know works best (Burger King's "Subservient Chicken" being the exception that proves the rule).

With viral media, the exceptions to marketing norms and assumptions seem to be the norm. An audience other than the intended one often responds; the most popular entries had long domain names for their websites; blogs are not always the drivers of traffic, while meta-sites such as Slashdot and CollegeHumordrove much site traffic, as did newspaper and radio reports - many from abroad - as well as magazine and TV mentions.