Viral marketing and social media are two phenomenons that we extensively talk about utilizing in class. The prospect of having these two mediums work together to potentially reach thousands, even millions, of people fast by just sending out one viral ad has began has been used to market everything from Doritos to movies. So it should come to no surprise that politicians also try to utilize this revolutionary combination to reach potential voters. So when Rick Perry's latest ad went viral and reached more than 3 million views in less than 5 days you would think he would be ecstatic. However, in this case viral media may have come back to bite him. His latest ad seems honest enough, Perry is shown walking through what seems like a wooded area wear a jacket to seem like a down to earth guy. However, when he utters the phrase:
"I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a Christian, but you don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school."
It's not hard to see why things could go very bad, very fast. On YouTube, Perry's ad has only 13,000 likes and over 500,000 dislikes.Worst of all, Perry's ad has become the launching ad for several scathing parodies that have become just as viral. Using the same background and format as Perry's ad these parodies range from a fake Perry describing his more explicit reason for disapproving of homosexuals (160,000), an atheist slamming Rick Perry running on a Christian platform (1,500,000 views), and even Jesus himself refuting any connection to Rick Perry (150,000 views). So the question remains: What the hell was Perry thinking? With all the advisors are individuals on his staff, wouldn't you think one person would step up and say, "Hey Rick, you know this could make a lot of people mad and ruin everything you worked for right?" Ask Howard Dean. All it took was the simple exclamation "BYAAAH" during an event to go from top of the back to bottom of the polls thanks to Dave Chappelle turning it into a skit on his show. So will this ruin Rick Perry's entire campaign? My guess is yes, but only time will tell.
