And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [54]
PAYDIRT
The Viral Factory, an all-viral ad agency started in London in 2000, keeps its U.S. headquarters in a low-slung redbrick building on a lazy block in Santa Monica, California. The firm shares its building with other, more traditional advertising firms, but its own offices are in a back room, a garagelike space with an oddly arced ceiling, cinderblock walls, and a concrete floor across which a fleet of mismatched tables are erratically deployed. Lying on one of them, the day I visited, was a gorilla mask of medium verisimilitude: not a drugstore item, but far from Hollywood-grade either—the caliber of gorilla mask whose wearing connotes an expensive sort of irony. It was a prop, said Henry Cowling, head of the Viral Factory’s U.S. office, from a recent shoot for IBM.
Unsurprisingly, a firm whose ads are exclusively viral makes such ads exceptionally well. As Cowling walked me through a show reel of the firm’s work, I was shocked at how many of the ads I had already seen, whether in e-mails or on blogs: ads for MTV, Trojan condoms, and even Ford. The Ford ad was from 2004, and I recalled it quite vividly from when I had seen it back then. A small Ford sedan sits parked on a quiet, leafy street, while in the foreground a pigeon malingers in a tree. After a long pause, the pigeon flies down toward the car; but just as it alights, the hood pops up to clout it, knocking the pigeon into the street to its apparent demise. As I recalled, its spread had seemed driven largely, if not entirely, by disbelief that Ford could have created an ad so cruel.
When I brought up this controversy, Cowling beamed—this had been entirely the point. “The fact that it was a pigeon, and the fact that pigeons crap on cars—it polarizes people,” he said. Cowling, twenty-seven, is tall, gregarious, and lanky, with curly red hair and a thick London accent; this day he wore a brown knit cap and a long-sleeved black T-shirt. “On the one hand, you got people who say, quite rightly, ‘We shouldn’t advocate cruelty to animals.’ And on the other hand, ‘That pigeon shat all over my fucking car,’ excuse my language. There is a debate; there is an argument. And where you have an argument, you have people talking. And where you have people talking, you have people posting and people sending stuff around and [pop!]”—here he snapped his fingers—“that’s paydirt.”
Having read all the chatter online about the ad myself, though, I was sure that buying a Ford had been the last thing on the minds of anyone—even the ad’s defenders. The problem with this spot was similar, really, to the problem with the Fusion Flash Concert: Ford had given itself a mandate to seem youthful, edgy, anarchic, despite the fact that its cars’ virtues were simply not these. Cowling showed me another viral video, this one made for Remington, the staid British maker of electric shavers. Shot in faux-documentary style, and purporting to promote the “spring/summer collection” of a stylist named Stefane Monzön, the video opens with testimonials from top models about Monzön’s abilities. As the video goes along, we slowly come to realize that what Monzön is a stylist of is in fact the models’ pubic hair, and the reel ends with a bona fide catwalk show of naked models with flamboyantly coiffed pudenda. It’s a truly jaw-dropping ad, and I was not surprised to see the chart of its viewership in its first twelve weeks, another prodigious spike:
FIG. 4-2—REMINGTON AD
But I also had to wonder how much benefit to Remington this ad really generated. Viral advertising seemed like it could only push the meaning of a brand in one direction: down. That is, more irreverent, more juvenile, more poking fun at itself—what Cowling called “self-reflective,” by which he meant “acknowledging that a brand is not necessarily bulletproof.” All to the good, perhaps, for many products with an inherently viral appeal—video games, rock bands, movies like The Blair Witch Project. But