Relentless virals ain’t viral

Coca-Cola is supporting its new energy drink Relentless with an online markteting campaign (via Brand Republic). A website delivers the message “No half measures” through videos animations. I like the look & feel of the site kind of artistic and unpredictable. Actually it’s not easy to understand what’s the product they’re trying to promote, and this can be good or bad, depending on how strong the brand is (so maybe in this case it’s bad…).

As said, the site has a lot of video content, which Coca-Cola directly calls “viral 1″, “viral 2″, “viral 3″. I hope it’s a naming mistake… how can you call a video “viral”? First of all, those are teasers (watch this, for example - opens .mov), not real virals. Second users will decide if the content is worth spreading the word, the brand cannot state it’s a “viral” video. Third, the only way to pass the videos to a friend is by copy & pasting the URL into an email, definitely too much a effort to spread the word about a video which is not viral.