There was a time, sometime in December, when it was impossible to walk down the street in an Indian metropolis without hearing a snatch from ‘Kolaveri’. The song, recorded by a group of Tamil actors and singers, has now been watched over 42 million times on the internet website YouTube; Sony Music, which owns the copyright, has seen a comparable number of downloads. Its amateurish, relaxed feel served to enhance its popularity. The group’s leader, the actor-singer Dhanush — born Venkatesh Prabhu Kasthuri Raja — pointed out in the course of a seminar on viral marketing at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad last week, that the film with which it is associated — 3 — received an enormous amount of publicity as a result. The film will now be released not just in Tamil, but also in Telugu and Hindi; and instead of just 400 prints, as originally planned, over 1,000 will be screened. When viral marketing works, it works spectacularly.

<p><table width='100%' border=0 cellspacing=0><tr><td style='FONT-FAMILY: Arial; FONT-SIZE: 18px; FONT-WEIGHT: bold; COLOR: #0253B7;'>The secret of ad energy  </td></tr><tr><tr><td style='FONT-FAMILY: Arial; FONT-SIZE: 11px; '>The 

The secret of ad energy

The Kolaveri sequel outlines the perils of viral marketing

More From This Section

The perils of forecasting

Great harvest, bad news

Railways halts its slide

The risks of austerity

Explore News