Viruses! They can spread so rapidly from person to person. I guess ‘recession’ has replaced ‘pandemic’ as the word that dominates our everyday anxieties, but for a while there I thought we were going to drown in a tsunami of antibacterial hand lotion.

Now, I don’t want to embarrass her by sharing this story, but we were at a street fair last summer, and, well, our doggie got a little excited and expressed her anxieties in a rather unfortunate manner on the cobblestone sidewalk. So I gathered up whatever materials were at hand and did a pretty good job of restoring the downtown to its former pristine condition. You know, my dog, my responsibility.It was a little awkward, and I was doing my best to practice invisibility, hoping that memories of the event would soon fade away, when out of the corner of my eye, I saw a figure rapidly approaching. “Ah! No!” I thought, “I’ve been dimed!” So I stood there trying to calculate the fine and trying to remember where I parked my car for a quick getaway.

“Thank you for cleaning up after your dog!” she said. “Now hold out your hands.”

She had the air of one of the event organizers, perhaps even the chairperson, concerned and authoritative, and so I held out my hands, for what? Handcuffs? The town key? Should I break into tears as I begged for mercy or should it be my humble acceptance speech through tears of joy? Well, hold the tears! What I got was a big glob of antibacterial cream.

Well, not all viruses are bad, even on computers. Granted, when they are bad, they can be pretty nasty, but there is a variety that adds an unusual twist to the word ‘marketing’. We’ve all experienced viral marketing when we were kids; you know, words like “wicked cool” and “bro”. Even before we were media saturated, these words would take off through the population like the Bubonic Plague during the Middle Ages. We don’t need books of knock-knock jokes, because we already know them, whether we’re from Baton Rouge, Louisiana or Fairbanks, Alaska. Think about it! What worse viruses are there out in the world than the Happy Birthday song or The Night Before Christmas.

Needless to say the WWW is awash with viruses, and one thing I’m sure of in this world is that as long as there is an Internet, it will be the perfect spot for growing such infectious thoughts and ideas. But what about launching something interesting with your business name attached—just nudging it out there in the stream and hoping it turns into a full-blown infection?

It’s a fascinating approach to advertising, because, one thing is for certain, you throw a typical ad out there into the stream, and it will be dead in the water. We are saturated with that kind of thing. But something new, fresh, fascinating, funny, beautiful, etc. can capture our imaginations quite easily, so much so that we want to pass the experience along to our friends and colleagues.

The good news is the cost of distribution—it’s free! The hard part is that it can’t be forced, and there is no way in advance to predict its success—like with a pop song or a box office hit. So the cost of advertising in this way is in the production of that thing that goes viral. It’s rare in advertising for the entire budget for an ad to be devoted to its creative development. I like that idea. So rather than an ad polluting our imaginations, viral marketing can feed our imaginations, even make us feel good. After all, if it didn’t do that why would we bother to pass it along?

Two examples stick out in my mind. A few years back, a friend sent me a link, and when I clicked on it, a little movie started playing that was titled “In the Doghouse,” about a young guy who buys his wife a vacuum cleaner for Valentine’s Day. For committing such a crime, she drags him by the ear out to the dog house—basically a sort of Oz-like high-security prison for losers, who by now have grown doggie noses and ears and tails. Well, I don’t want to spoil the end, but it was really funny, well-conceived and played like a feature film comedy. At the very end, we find out it was all an elaborate Valentine’s Day ad for J.C. Penney’s jewelry department. Normally, I would have been outraged at having been taken in, but because it was done so well and so enjoyable, I even went so far as to pass it along.Adobe also created an even more elaborate and fascinating one to advertise its Creative Suite design software, by putting it to use creating a long-running animation that used playing cards to build and depict the elements of what turned out to be a battle between pirate ships. It was unusual and unique and quite beautiful—mesmerizing—that again, I came away feeling enriched rather than betrayed.

Both companies invested a lot of money in these projects—they had to, given the quality of their creativity and production. That said, I don’t believe that money will buy us love when it comes to viral marketing—in fact, it can be quite simple, but it has to move us in some way or other in order for us to pass it along. It also does not have to circulate the globe in order to be effective. It could circulate within a region of the country, a community, or throughout an industry.

Even if it doesn’t succeed, I believe it’s a healthy endeavor to consider, because to be effective—to become viral and touch many lives—it has to be somehow enriching. Not a bad way for us to be spending our time.