On Valentine's Day, 25,000 people visited www.whoorderedroomservice.com to find out who was behind a sophomoric commercial in which an amorous couple gets covered in vomit.
The previous week, a link to the site had spread like wildfire by e-mail, forwarded by thousands of people who find humour in barf jokes, and intrigue in the fact that the marketer would remain anonymous until Feb. 14.
When it was revealed that the site was promoting Room Service, the latest album by Bryan Adams, it led to debates in on-line advertising chat rooms about whether the ad was a stroke of genius or a huge mistake by Mr. Adams.
In fact, the ad was a hoax, created for fun by Frank Lesser and Jason Woliner, amateur filmmakers from New York.
Hoax commercials are becoming more common, with Ford Motor Co. and Volkswagen AG among the recently spoofed. With so many people getting fooled, marketing experts are divided on whether they help or hurt the brands they spoof.
x Some say the phony ads undermine the very future of legitimate "viral" marketing — one of the hottest trends in advertising.
"If we start getting our e-mail boxes filled with huckster ads, then what do you do as an audience member? You filter them all out," said Ken Wong, a marketing professor at Queen's University School of Business.
When advertisers launch legitimate viral campaigns, they usually start by sending a link or video ad to a few dozen friends and acquaintances. If the ad takes off and "goes viral" — usually because it is edgy or risqué — it can end up in hundreds of thousands of e-mail boxes by the next morning.
But the medium's greatest strength — that it's a cheap way to reach people — is also its greatest weakness, since anyone with a video camera and a computer can quickly create and distribute an "ad."
Most advertisers go to great lengths to distance themselves from fake advertising.
"Not by any stretch of the imagination has the ad been endorsed by Bryan [Adams] or his management company," said Tyson Parker, a spokesman for Universal Music Canada.
Mr. Wong recommends that victims of illegitimate advertising launch lawsuits against the culprits. He said the hoaxes can do great damage to brands that companies have spent years nurturing.
"If it were me, I would spare no expense to put an end to it, because I really do think that it ends up threatening the integrity of everything else," Mr. Wong said.
German auto maker Volkswagen initially threatened a lawsuit against the creators of a hoax ad in which a terrorist tries to use one of its cars for a suicide bomb. When the bomb explodes inside the VW Polo, the car and its surroundings are unharmed. The commercial ends with the tagline "small but tough."
The car company initially said the ad was an "attack on Volkswagen's good reputation," but later agreed not to sue the people behind the spot if they apologized.
Michael Wurstlin, founder of Toronto ad agency WurstlinGroup, said he thinks Volkswagen protested too loudly about the spot, which, though unauthorized, effectively communicated that the car is well built. "For their demographic, it probably adds a little bit to their stature in some perverse way."
But companies say unauthorized ads can do great damage to brands. A Toronto ad agency recently bought television air time to run an unauthorized advertisement for Molson Canadian in an effort to win a legitimate assignment from the company. Molson said the ad not only cheapened its brand, but may have run afoul of regulations governing beer ads.
In another recent example, Ford created a British viral campaign designed to position its SportKa car as the "evil twin" to its subcompact Ka car. One ad, in which the car swats a pigeon with its hood, was released over the Internet.
A second spot, in which a computer-generated cat is decapitated by the car's sunroof, was rejected. But months later, the ad was leaked and spread quickly over the Internet. Ford and its agency have distanced themselves from the ad.
Despite the rise in spoofs, many see a bright future in viral advertising. On Monday, British viral marketer Asa Bailey put an ad that he created up for auction on eBay. The ad, in which a Victoria Beckham look-alike gets run over by a bus, is available to any marketer who wants to sponsor the spot before it goes viral.
The New York filmmaker Mr. Lesser, 25, said he and Mr. Parker created the faux Bryan Adams ad as a sort of experiment to see whether people would be fooled and how big it could get.
"We don't actually want to hurt anyone's feelings or get anyone upset," Mr. Lesser said in an interview. "I'm sort of hoping Bryan Adams will see humour in this if it is ever brought to his attention."
