Brian Morrissey of Mediaweek published an article today about the Rules of Viral Success that is a great read for anyone who works in advertising or is interested in understanding what tactics work in viral marketing.

He notes that one of the key components to a successful viral campaign is to focus on simplicity. He cites OfficeMax’s Elf Yourself and Burger King’s Simpsonizeme as good examples of sites that focus on one simple task that is then easily sent out to others in your social network. In advertising, creatives often try to out-do each other to the point that a simple site becomes buried with complexity. Morrissey cites Verizon’s Action Hero site as a site that had amazing functionality but lower user interaction, and hypothesizes that it is due to complexity of the site (which is down, but you can see an example of the videos you could make on YouTube).

The Elf Yourself campaign was smart, not only because it is so simple to use that even a grandmother can create a message, but also because it is one of the few recurring viral successes. OfficeMax was smart to re-introduce the application they created last year — and it points to how seasonality and simplicity can help advertisers who want to reuse content instead of reinventing the wheel each time they want to create a marketing campaign. Apparently people never tire of getting custom messages from their friends dressed as elves. I would imagine that OfficeMax will continue to use the Elf Yourself campaign in coming years, and it will become as intrinsic to the Christmas season as all those holiday songs that you hear, everywhere you go, for the 6 weeks leading up to Christmas.

Moral of the story: Follow the KISS principle, and steer away from user experiences that are overly complex. If the goal of the experience is to be viral, short experiences will more likely to be embraced.

In related news, Kevin Nalts of Will Video for Food recently published How to Become Popular on YouTube (Without Any Talent) that has some great pointers including tech details on how to shoot, edit and publish online videos. Key pointers include:

• Keep your content short
• Captivate in the first 20 seconds
• Finish with a big bang
• And interestingly, apparently participating in the highly influential Stickam community can result in getting large view counts on YouTube.

I was checking my Gmail account today when a little text ad appeared on the top of the page:

I rarely click through on ads that I see, text or banners, but for some reason this one caught my attention, so I clicked through to see a site that is selling two children’s books, one titled Why Mommy is a Democrat and one titled Why Daddy is a Democrat.

Here is an example of one of the pages from the books:

I guess I’m a skeptic at heart, but when I first took a look at the site I thought surely it must be some Republican joke targeted at Democrats, like those books that explain why Mommy or Daddy is gay. But apparently these are simply children’s books about being part of the Democratic Party.

I still think it is weird that we need books that explain politics in this way to children (and it definitely reeks a bit of discomforting propaganda - it assumes a universal underdog stigma is attached to being a Democrat, something I’d expect more of someone writing a children’s book about the Green Party, for example), but I definitely give props to the author for his creative use of Google AdSense. I clicked through.

In advertising, we often make distinctions between “traditional” and “interactive” advertising. While I dislike these terms, and often use air-quotes in my own conversations about “traditional” advertising, I also realize that the two are often different beasts. Sean from two forty eight put together a deck about how traditional agencies need to wake up and embrace digital coffee. Or something like that. The deck is a bit hard to read (fonts are small) but his points are valid to anyone who is trying to invoke change at a traditional shop.

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Contagious Magazine is one of my favorite mags to come out in the past few years. It costs an arm and a leg ($1900 for an annual subscription), but they give the coolest holiday cards - their Most Contagious Annual. This beautifully published PDF highlights the most contagious experiences in the online, gaming, technology, design, architecture and retail spaces. Worth checking out, and then referring to for the entire year. Thank you Contagious!

If you work in advertising, you know that some of the people’s egos in the space are certainly overblown. This parody of Hitler’s creative department is one art director’s lens of working for an oppressive advertising agency.