Intertextuality in Advertising/Viral Campaigns

When trying to think of advertisements that don't seem like ads, it was difficult at first to think of any (for obvious reasons). But as advertising has evolved, especially with the explosion of the internet even in the last ten years, it has changed the way our generation interacts with products, companies, movies, television, etc. This can be seen in the study done by Phillips and McQuarrie, where advertisements over time lost their verbal anchorage and layered more and more rhetorical figures into ads, relying on the viewer to participate more in forming ideas about the company or product. The complication of advertisements' rhetorical ploys has increased with new campaign avenues. An interesting one is viral marketing, which uses previously existing social networks to promote a brand or company. This is the kind of marketing campaign that relies on word of mouth to promote its popularity. YouTube is a huge facilitator in this kind of marketing. Viral marketing takes viewer participation to the extreme, functioning as part of the marketing team and taking sole responsibility in promotion.

Before looking a specific viral marketing campaign, it’s interesting to look at YouTube as a kind of advertiser that uses its viewership to promote it, in essence a massive-scale viral campaign. Here is a huge company that defies the boundaries of the kind of genre distinctions we can give it; in reading some of the kind of genre descriptions Cook gives as examples can be applied to YouTube: games, jokes, films, lessons, news, stories, web pages, soap operas. Describing it’s genre as a definition is almost impossible because of its communication context changes with every video. Promotion of individual videos lies entirely on its viewership to cultivate it as an industry. And it works.

Here is the Blendtec viral campaign:
http://www.youtube.com/user/blendtec?blend=1&ob=4#p/a/u/1/_S8sxpK4_iA

Blendtec is a strange kind of YouTube phenomenon. As a participant in the online video world, Blendtec is first most popular as entertainment. But in terms of genre definition, they are a series of infomercials to promote the power of Blendtec blenders. In turn, the videos have become so popular that other companies, specifically Apple, have been promoted through the Blendtec campaign because Tom Dickson blended the iPhone 4 and other apple products. Not only has the Blendtec brand of blenders increased in sales, but Tom Dickson has become an internet sensation on sites such as Digg, and the phrase “Will It Blend?” has garnered huge popularity. As a YouTube video, the Blendtec videos are actually paid by YouTube because of how many hits the videos have had during its duration. The iPhone blending episode has had over 100 million hits. Revver also host’s the Blendtec videos, which have given Blendtec a heavy payout due to its popularity on video-hosting website.

Intertexuality in these kinds of viral campaigns comes from the collective understanding of the products involved in the videos. Blendtec is looking to promote their blenders, but the popularity of the iPhone is what aids in their popularity as a product. Mimicking comedy videos and making fun of Bill Gates relies on the audience’s understanding of the Windows/Mac advertising war. It’s interesting because on the surface, these kind of advertising campaigns are just another YouTube video.