Mediaweek: Report highlights viral marketing problems

Datamonitor's new report on viral marketing warns that the practice has as much potential to backfire as to create free publicity and exposure for brands. "Bad news travels quicker than good news," noted Daniel Bone, the author of the report. While noting that information overload is leading to an increased reliance on recommendations from friends and family, the report highlights the risks of creative forms that require sometimes outlandish stunts in order to gain the attention of those people in the first place.

For every Budvar - a beer brand that grew 40 percent in 2003 through word of mouth efforts - there seems to be a Carlsberg - the beer brand that spread an email pretending that England's loss to France in soccer might be redeemed by a (false) discovery that one of the French players failed a drug test. When beer swillers got to the part of the email where they realized the whole thing was an ad, they got angry. The version that got spread around the Internet most was an altered one that, um, wasn't very complimentary of Carlsberg's taste.