Anyone with even a moderate-to-mild blog habit could probably identify the online adworld's most divisive story of the last few months. In late July, as part of an effort to win the Subway account, the New York office of the interactive house Agency.com uploaded a nine-minute video to YouTube. The piece, dubbed "Going To Work For Subway: Part 1", portrayed the agency in various stages of the pitch, from their initial brainstorming session right through to their market research tactics (staffers scoring gigs as sandwich artists).

The meta-joke, of course, was that the video was the pitch - or at least a substantial part of it - and the cutesiness of the stunt prompted a rabid online debate on the degree to which it was effective. Advocates deemed the piece a clever use of the medium; detractors said it was so in love with the idea of itself it forgot to offer up any useful insights. The flap spun off an entirely separate ideological battle royale concerning the meaning of the word 'viral'. In its initial description on its YouTube debut, Agency.com referred to the piece as "a viral video". Eventually, the film found its way onto most of the major ad blogs, generating concentrated discussion to the extent that defenders triumphantly upheld the agency's original definition. "You are all talking about it - so it is VIRAL," wrote one commenter on AdFreak.com.

Except: that's not what viral means. And the constant misapplication of the word, says Barbarian Group president Benjamin Palmer, speaks to some people's misunderstanding of the online sphere. "It's actually just news," he says. "It's a news item within our industry. Viral implies it goes to you, and you send it to 10 friends, and they send it to 10 friends, and they send it to 10 friends. If it's in a very tiny [network], maybe we can call that incest. This is not a virus - it's incest."

Proving themselves savvy damage controllers if nothing else, Agency.com responded to the fracas with its own website (whenwerollwerollbig.com) a few days after the blowup, on which it compiled the feedback underneath the header "What exactly IS viral marketing? The debate continues", a move that made it look like they intended to orchestrate such intense levels of discussion all along. But since the YouTube piece's tenuous worth is the root of all

the debate, the only way the agency could have anticipated this kind of response is if they purposely set out to make something a huge contingent would see as superfluous and clichéd. Here we get to the heart of the issue: is this just a viral in the most forgiving sense of the word, or a shining example of an agency piggybacking on a buzzword to make it look a little more plugged in than it is? "On one level it is just semantics, but on another level it's a very important distinction," says Palmer. "We've turned down jobs that are creative endeavors that would be successful if they had a viral effect, but [agencies] wanted us to guarantee a certain amount of success, and that depends on external factors and the whim of the people. That's the huge difference: people are misusing the term in a way that they think it's a shortcut. The underlying reason that's bad is because, on the business side of advertising, people think it's a new avenue where you can get the same results without spending money on media, and that's generally not true at all. It's sometimes true, but we don't recommend it." Agency.com> http://www.agency.com
When We Roll We Roll Big> http://www.whenwerollwerollbig.com
The Barbarian Group> http://www.thebarbariangroup.com