I just got a message from my contact form from a “viral seeding” company. I won’t give them the benefit of more publicity so names are removed but it went something like this:

Hi there,

Hope you don’t mind me getting in touch. I work for [snipped], and we’re making sure design sites in the UK and Italy know about a quirky campaign we’re running to promote the launch of a new creative community of icon designers. It showcases the unusual talents of a very creative dog who writes romance poetry in an entirely novel (some might say downright strange!) way…

You can watch the video here, if you want to check it out:
[snipped]

If you’re interested in running the clip on a commercial basis, we can give you a video player to embed, pay you an initial amount for running the content, and also pay you for each view of the clip in the UK and Italy.

[Some stuff cut out here]

Kind regards,
[snipped]

It’s strange enough that these people even found me when my blog is still fairly young and hasn’t got a great page rank. I searched around and found a few people who had got near identical form letters but for other things. I guess I’m a little naive to think most of the viral links passed my way are ‘genuinely’  interesting or funny things rather than manufactured, but it seems an area that corporations are taking more and more interest in. I suspect there’s not a whole lot of regulation either, compared to traditional advertising media.

It just strikes me as humorous that some people are paid to just send out these emails all day, trying to get word out about their new zany video. Incidentally the video mentioned in my message was about a dog shitting out letters that formed poetry – yeah…

If virals are named because like a virus, they spread by contact from person to person, what does that make viral seeding? Biological warfare?

Edit: now I just want to show my friends the video to prove how strange it all was – arghh I’ve fallen for it!