We've all seen the commercial. The Sock-Monkey, the Squeak-Monster, the Robot, the Teddy and some sort of Yarn Creature dream of an adventure centering around the freedom of being big enough to drive whatever that car is the ad is selling, set to the indie rock beat of a band called The Heavy.

I know the name of the band because that information can be easily found by plugging the song into my favorite search engine. They hold the honor of being the first band to ever be asked by Letterman to play an encore of a song, and it was that song.

I remember that this particular commercial first aired during the Superbowl. I suppose we could only guess how many millions of dollars that car company has spent getting that commercial out there and then running it over and over during primetime on television for the last few months. The commercial has been run so much, in fact, it’s dangerously close to making me kind of sick of it…

Yet, I don’t know the name of that car. Do you?

All of that air time bought, all that money spent, and that cute, fun commercial has failed to do the one thing it needed to do most: make me like that car. I don’t even know what kind of car it is…

That really bugged me, so I searched some more, and since they spent all that money I guess it’s only fair to mention it’s a Kia. Let’s examine just how Kia wasted all that money.

Though catching a virus is generally considered an annoyance, a good Viral Advertising Campaign has to be the opposite of that to catch on. A Viral Campaign makes people go looking for your message, not get tired of hearing it. Having spent the money to make a fun commercial and then run it during the Superbowl, the company should have switched gears and set it free on the internet, letting it be distributed, at no cost to the advertiser, through e-mail, Facebook and Twitter using YouTube or Vimeo.

Utilizing the money saved by choosing not to run the commercial into the ground on primetime TV every night for months, the company could have spent considerably less to include Search Engine Optimization and a massive Social Media presence in their campaign, to keep the message upbeat, fun and all that much more reachable for their target audiences.

By now, we could have had more commercials, too. The Robot could take the car off into the woods for a camping trip to show how rugged and outdoorsy the car is, and the Squeak-Monster could have used it to take over a city to show the car’s urban side. By controlling the release of the new commercials through Social Media, people would be watching the car company to catch that new video rather than wishing they’d stop running that same ad over and over.

Viral Campaigns spread because people want to share interesting and fun videos with their friends and family. Sending something cool to someone that hasn’t seen it makes you feel cool, so the probability that something will be shared enough to be considered viral is inversely related to whether you think they’ve already seen it. That’s why Kia should have stopped after the Superbowl. Everyone would have wanted that video in their Inbox within a week if the commercial hadn’t already been in their face on TV a hundred times.

That is the underlying beauty of the viral method. Instead of trying to force your message down the throats of your potential customers, you use more creative methods to have them coming to you. These methods are proven to achieve just that, and that means that Viral Campaigns are the way your customers prefer to be reached.

If you give them what they want, they will give you the business you want.

It’s just too bad Kia only sells cars, because after seeing that commercial a thousand times, I would definitely buy a Sock-Monkey from them.