With the Smeet contest up and running its a great time to watch some great examples of viral marketing. Viral campaigns are an amazing way to generate a huge amount of buzz and brand awareness whether they are carried out online or offline.

In this post we made a selection of the best viral campaigns we have seen so far.

Ronaldinho: Touch of Gold (Nike)

23.5 million people have watched this ad on YouTube. Pure genius.

Dynamite Surfing (Quicksilver)

With 10 million page views in the first few months of launch this viral advert for Quicksilver took the web by storm and did more to promote the brand than all their other advertising combined.

Do The Test (Transport for London)

This video has made the list purely because it has seen so many page views in a very short time. In just 3 months over 3.7 million people have viewed the video, making it one of the top campaigns of 2008.

Stolen Nascar (TaxBrain.com)

Promoting a website about tax is pretty difficult so the marketers behind this stunt decided to get creative.

They staged the theft of a Nascar with their website address on the site and managed to get over $1 million woth of TV exposure totally free within just a few days.

Threshers 40% Off Voucher

In 2006, shortly before Christmas, Threshers leaked a voucher worth 40% off wine and champagne via the internet. Apparently the voucher was only intended for suppliers and the belief that Threshers had mistakenly released the voucher made it spread faster and faster around the world via email, social networks and blogs.

Threshers pretended to be worried about losing money on the promotion but no doubt ended up making a huge profit and getting publicity in a month than they got for the whole year.

Hotmail

In todays era of social networking it’s easy to think how quickly the likes of Facebook and Myspace grew but the real viral marketing pioneer was Hotmail.
In December 1996 Hotmail had 500,000 registered users – less than a year later they had over 12,000,000 users. This astonishing growth rate was down to the fact that every single email sent from Hotmail included a small advert promoting the service in the footer.

Via