Viral marketing – but why?

Like pretty much every Internet user, I have pop-up blockers on my web browser, spam filters on my email and always ignore the adverts on web pages, and yet just a couple days ago I found myself trading links with a friend to YouTube videos of entertaining adverts. It suddenly struck me that I go out of my way to avoid advertising, and yet I am inflicting adverts on to my friend and him on to me. The brands in the videos would possibly consider us their target audience and despite working in marketing myself, I fell hopelessly for their clever tricks.

So, why would I do this? Surely website banner adverts are designed to be eye catching and interesting, and yet how many times have you passed on a screen capture of a banner advert? A prime example of viral marketing is the Cadburys Gorilla that swept across youtube a couple of years ago, a clever little piece of marketing that seemed to liven up many peoples’ office hours, presumably in an attempt to reflect the joy a bar of chocolate could bring. It was never meant to be disguised as anything but an advert, so perhaps we are not as averse to advertising as we would like to let on. Advertising as entertainment is something that keeps coming in waves, and perhaps a classic example of an early version of this would be the Hamlet cigar adverts of the 70s. These adverts stick in our minds because they are entertaining, and for some reason we think they shouldn’t be, thus almost creating a taboo.
It’s often said, but it can’t be said enough…make an advert to entertain and people will remember it, and do a lot of the leg work for you by passing it on and talking about it. I hate to say it, but I think that people who advertise car insurance are the cleverest marketers of them all. There is nothing ‘sexy’, fun or even interesting about car insurance, so by making the adverts as annoying as possible people will remember them and parody them and keep the advert alive. Just look at the GoCompare opera singer, very annoying and yet who doesn’t occasionally enjoy bursting into song with a faux-Italian accent about car insurance (or perhaps that’s just me).
To go back to my original point, why do we pass on adverts when we would also go out of our way to avoid them? For fun, entertainment and because we are all fools for a smile occasionally.