Tthe Cardo Systems Cell Phone Popcorn Popping YouTube Viral Marketing Campaign

With the wildly popular YouTube success of the infamous videos purportedly showing regular people popping popcorn kernels with their cell phones, the world of sharing online viral videos has probably taken a historic turn. Viral marketing has been around for decades, of course, but with the rise of the internet the concept of guerilla advertising has reached heights, or depths, of success and experimentation never dreamed of by companies. While what Cardo Systems did with its cell phone popcorn YouTube video advertising campaign was not exactly unprecedented; the manner in which it is was conducted, not to mention its popularity, will almost certainly make the whole event go down in history. After all, there is now going to be a tremendously bigger segment of the YouTube-going public that will finally realize that people should never trust anything they see in these online videos. Especially on YouTube since it is the most popular posting site for what will doubtlessly be a tsunami of similar viral marketing videos.

The cell phone popcorn video was a fake, you see. It was accomplished by good old-fashioned special effects editing, and not even particularly state of the art effects at that. To their credit, a good number of the thousands of YouTube visitors who left comments on the Cardo video expressed skepticism that popcorn could be popped using only four cell phones, but even an bigger number apparently tried to recreate the video themselves. And then, of course, there was also the fact that the video seemed to sending out the subliminal message that revolved around the never-ending concern over what cell phones may be doing to our brains if it only takes four of them to generate enough heat to pop some Orville Redenbacher.

The real legacy of the Cardo Systems popcorn popping YouTube ad, however, stands to be its place in history in exposing the sinister foundation beneath viral marketing campaigns. It is one thing for a company to mislead you with a commercial that includes fine print so small you'd have to be two inches away from the TV to read it (or any of the other thousand methods of hiding the truth) but it's something else entirely for a company to mislead you into thinking that you aren't even watching an advertisement but just a home video of people with far too much time on their hands. Most of us have already lost confidence in the mainstream media to not hide the truth from us, but at this point we are still fairly confident that average people aren't out to misinform through the simple act of uploading a video onto YouTube. If Americans lose assurance in the truthfulness of each other, what will be left to believe in?

Consider it in these terms: what if all those YouTube videos with the guys exploding Diet Coke bottles by dropping Mentos (the Freshmaker!) into them had turned out to be a total fake constructed by the architects of untruths on Madison Avenue? And what if you had gone out and bought bottles of Diet Coke and packages of Mentos and wasted an hour or two trying to recreate the explosive fun you saw on the videos? Wouldn't you be mad when you found out those explosions had been faked? Or what if you shared or Digged a video that showed an attack on soldiers in Iraq, or a criminal making an escape after robbing a convenience store only to find out later it was actually a movie trailer done in viral video YouTube style? If you wouldn't be pissed at that, then you are the perfect audience for such efforts.

Viral marketing is fundamentally based on the fake-out. It has long been standard practice for liquor companies to hire beautiful sexy women to cozy up to guys inside bars and get them to order Brand X alcohol, all the while subtly talking up just how incredible the drink was, even to the point of suggesting it was making them incredibly randy. Only, of course, to reject any proposition by the poor deluded sap to leave the bar together. As soon as sap number 1 leaves, she finds another sucker. But that is fake-out on an intimate scale. What Cardo Systems did was to fake out millions of people and all for the sake of selling their product. And what was that product?

Hey, I'm not part of their viral marketing scam. Find out for yourself if you actually care about helping these dweebs.