Marketing Email

1996Internet culture concept / marketing practiceclassic

Published March 10, 2026 · Updated March 23, 2026

Also known as: Viral Marketing · Viral Advertising · Viral Email · Pass-Along Email

Viral marketing email is the practice of crafting promotional content that spreads organically through forwarding, social sharing, and word of mouth online1. The concept dates back to the mid-1990s, when services like Hotmail turned every outgoing message into a tiny advertisement, and it evolved through landmark campaigns like Burger King's Subservient Chicken and Old Spice's real-time YouTube responses3. As a category of internet culture, viral marketing sits at the intersection of advertising and meme creation, with the most successful campaigns becoming shared cultural moments in their own right.

email memesviral marketing memesspam ad memesadvertising memescorporate virality memes

Overview

Viral marketing email describes any promotional message or campaign engineered to propagate from person to person without traditional ad spending driving each impression. The term covers everything from forwarded email promotions to elaborate branded video campaigns designed for social sharing3. A viral email spreads when someone receives a message, usually humorous or provocative, and forwards it to contacts who do the same, creating an exponential distribution chain similar to biological contagion1.

What separates viral marketing from spam is the social layer. Spam blasts unsolicited messages to massive lists. Viral campaigns rely on recipients choosing to pass the content along because it's funny, surprising, or useful enough to share1. The best examples blur the line between advertisement and entertainment so thoroughly that people share them the way they'd share a meme.

Origin & Background

Platform
Email (Hotmail), Web
Key People
Timothy Draper, Douglas Rushkoff
Date
1996

American media theorist Douglas Rushkoff explored the concept of content spreading like a virus through networks in his 1996 book *Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture*3. Around the same time, Timothy Draper, founder of the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, is often credited with coining the specific term "viral marketing"3.

The concept got its first proof of concept in July 1996 when Hotmail launched with the tagline "Get your free email at Hotmail" appended to the bottom of every outgoing email. That single line turned every Hotmail user into an unpaid promoter. The service signed up 12 million users in its first 18 months, a growth rate that shocked the tech industry3.

On December 31, 1996, business magazine *Fast Company* published "The Virus of Marketing," an article that framed successful marketing programs through an epidemiological lens, treating brand awareness like a pathogen moving through a population3.

How It Spread

The early 2000s saw viral marketing jump from email taglines to dedicated web campaigns. On April 8, 2004, Burger King launched the Subservient Chicken website, featuring a man in a chicken suit responding to over 300 user-typed commands2. The site was a breakout hit that proved interactive branded content could hold attention the way entertainment did3.

By October 2006, Blendtec launched "Will It Blend?" on YouTube, a series showing host Tom Dickson destroying everything from iPhones to golf balls in a blender. The campaign turned a niche appliance brand into a household name3. Doritos followed with its "Crash the Super Bowl" contest in February 2007, crowdsourcing consumer-made commercials for the biggest advertising event of the year3.

The practice also had its deceptive side. In May 2008, a YouTube video appeared to show cell phones popping popcorn kernels through radiation. The clip went viral before being revealed as a campaign for Bluetooth company Cardo Wireless3. Italian fashion label Diesel and content filtering company Porn Blocker both experimented with work-safe suggestive content as viral bait in 20083.

Old Spice redefined the genre in February 2010 with "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like," starring Isaiah Mustafa in a rapid-fire monologue that aired during the Super Bowl. The real breakthrough came in July 2010 when Old Spice launched a three-day campaign where Mustafa recorded real-time video responses to fans on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Digg. The Old Spice YouTube channel pulled in over 23 million views within 36 hours3.

Not every viral marketing attempt worked as planned. On January 18, 2012, McDonald's promoted the Twitter hashtag #McDStories to encourage fond memories of the restaurant chain. Users hijacked the tag with jokes and complaints instead3.

By 2013, Nabisco's "Cookie vs. Creme" campaign for Oreo and Dove's "Real Beauty Sketches" videos (where forensic artist Gil Zamora drew women based on self-descriptions versus stranger descriptions) both showed that emotional and creative hooks could drive massive organic sharing3.

Platforms

TwitterTwitter
View on Google Trends

How to Use This Meme

Viral marketing email isn't a meme template in the traditional sense but rather a strategy category. In practice, brands typically follow a few patterns:

1

The embedded hook — Include a shareable element (tagline, link, voucher) inside every email or message that gives recipients a reason to forward it. Hotmail's footer tagline is the original version of this approach3.

2

The entertaining bait — Create content so funny, shocking, or compelling that people share it voluntarily. "Will It Blend?" and Old Spice response videos both used entertainment value to earn organic distribution3.

3

The social challenge — Invite users to participate and create content themselves, as Doritos did with "Crash the Super Bowl"3.

4

The voucher chain — Send discount codes or offers designed for forwarding. UK off-licence chain Threshers emailed vouchers to staff and suppliers in 2006. Recipients forwarded them so aggressively that multiple branches nearly ran out of stock1.

Create Your Own

Cultural Impact

Viral marketing fundamentally changed how brands approach advertising online. A 2004 study into viral email behavior found that humor was the strongest driver of forwarding, with risqué content and crime warnings also triggering shares. The study also found that the most common reason people didn't forward emails was a sense that the content felt old1.

The practice created a feedback loop with internet culture. Campaigns that worked well (Old Spice, Subservient Chicken) became memes themselves, discussed and remixed far beyond their original promotional intent. Campaigns that failed (#McDStories) also became memes, just not the kind the brands wanted3.

The email-specific branch of viral marketing spawned dedicated collection websites like Viralbank, Bore Me, and ViralEmails, where users archived and shared both commercial and non-commercial viral messages1. These sites functioned as early meme archives, preserving the chain emails and promotional stunts that circulated before social media centralized sharing.

One risk the practice introduced: many viral emails that looked like real promotions were actually fake, and these fakes could damage brand reputation without the brand's involvement1.

Fun Facts

A Ferrari test drive email campaign received over 40,000 responses despite only 5,000 emails being originally sent, proving the exponential math behind viral distribution1.

Threshers repeated its viral voucher stunt the following year after the first campaign accidentally drained store inventory, despite initially denying it was a deliberate viral strategy1.

Old Spice's 2011 follow-up campaign cast model Fabio Lanzoni as a rival "Old Spice Guy," staging a mock competition with Isaiah Mustafa that Mustafa won3.

Swedish artist Jonna Lee created the mysterious "iamamiwhoami" YouTube series in December 2009, uploading cryptic videos of a blonde woman with a distorted face before revealing it as a viral marketing stunt for her electronic music project3.

Frequently Asked Questions