Matt Smith
Founder, The Viral Factory, London
I think it's a case of viral is dead, long live viral. It's certainly changed beyond recognition from the days when we started but there are important elements that survived.

When we started, the thing everyone got excited about was this very rapid spread by a self-selecting audience. It was a very private conversation and that had implications for marketing in the sense that you could piggyback people's private conversations. That has pretty much gone.

I don't think email is a major distribution channel anymore. It's now social networking - blogs are a massive channel for us via YouTube. That means that the content you want to share with people has changed radically. I guess the comparison we use is, I might tell a very off-color joke to a group of friends at the pub, which is a very similar circumstance to someone sending an email with a very dodgy clip to it, but I'm not going to hang a very offensive poster in my living room because my mother-in-law might see it. The implications for viral marketing are a) it's not quite so viral anymore and b) it's about content that people want to display to the world. People have become channels in a very public sense; broadcast rather than a one-to-one.

The implications are pretty positive. There's still room for corporations to create content that's basically marketing but consumed as content. We're still making stuff that is competing with everything else out there; it doesn't live in the advertising space of a website, it lives in the editorial space.

I think when we started viral was overhyped. I don't think it's gone away to the extent people think it has; if you look at something like Cadbury "Eyebrow Dance", that's in one way the triumph of viral. People are starting to think about TV ads in ways that are much closer to the way we in viral do. So I would suggest that actually we're on the cusp of the revolution that we hoped would always happen: ads would become interesting. I think we won!

Ted Royer
ECD, droga5, New York
It's great because for years advertising has always been about agencies saying to clients you have to be more creative, there's that eternal argument. Super creative virals show that stance can be right.

I didn't think there was anything more disposable than advertising until I started doing virals. You have one shot at making it catch fire otherwise it'll disappear. When Guitar Hero World Tour "Bike Hero" was out we were competing with a cat riding a Roomba, and that was getting as many hits as us. It was really close for a while, fucking Roomba cat. There's no way you can set out to predict it.

You're competing against the most adorable animals, the guy who smashes his crotch in a skateboarding accident, some pretty wicked stuff, so you have to be more adventurous than an ad, and that's fun. We're going to keep going for stuff that's fucking hilarious and really entertaining.

We don't usually set out to create a viral; we just set out to create a piece that we'll get an amazing reaction from.

We want people to have fun, I don't think you're going to get anywhere by tricking people. You can't look at tagging Air Force 1 before thinking, 'Wait, he would have been shot'. So we try and stretch credibility, but it's for entertainment, discussion and engagement. You don't have to have a logo at the end of it. A tiny percentage protest it's a commercial, but everyone else is like so what? Who cares if companies have as much fun as the best stuff out there?

Faris Yakob
Chief technology strategist, McCann Erickson, New York
If you accept that in a digital place there's too much fragmentation, you can't really buy attention like you used to. What used [to happen] is content would aggregate eyeballs for us and we would interrupt it and smash some messaging in there. But if you separate those two things out and you want to attract attention to the commercial stuff, then it has to be fighting within this content ecosystem of all this stuff that is interesting. My brother calls it the natural selection of interestingness.

The metaphor of viral is very unhelpful. It suggests that something is self propagating, which simply isn't the case. Content doesn't move by itself, it needs people to pass it around, so the action is very much them pulling, rather than this magic stuff spreading itself across networks. At my old place we did some activation work on Cadbury "Gorilla". It became the most viewed ad online as a viral, but having it open to remix culture garnered millions more impressions.

I think you can encourage reappropriation of content, you can't force it. "Eyebrow Dance" is what [digital guru] Clay Shirky calls an invitation to participate; it's been very specifically structured to be something you could do at home. The more people mess with the things that you do, the more likely they are to pass it around, because they suddenly have a vested interest in its propagation. That lack of control is difficult for most brands to deal with, but if you want things to spread you have to trade control for influence.

It requires a very different way of thinking: my opposite number Mark Ruxin in San Francisco calls this portfolio theory - lighting lots of little fires. It's exactly the same model that record companies and VCs have been using for years. It's very difficult to predict how hits are going to work, so they hedged against that by making 10 things, nine of which will make you a loss and one which will make you 10 times your money back.

Digital stuff exists separate from its distribution channel. Everything is digital, being at your TV or computer or phone is kind of irrelevant, it's all digital. The issue becomes how to garner attention: how do you broadcast in a world where everything is being pulled, not pushed? I have no idea. Make stuff worth pulling.

McCann Erickson, New York http://www.mccann.com
The Viral Factory http://www.theviralfactory.com
Droga5 http://www.droga5.com