In early 2011, Jason Harris, Mekanism’s president, and Pete Caban, CEO were considering converting Mekanism from a specialized, niche production company, to a full-service ad agency. At the time, Mekanism was a digital social media production company that developed viral marketing campaigns for various firms. They had great success seeing 68% annual growth in billings which was fasted than they had predicted. In 2010, they saw sequential increases in profits, but only 10% growth in billings with fewer clients signing on. This posed a unique situation for Mekanism offering a couple of options. They could remain a niche creative shop that specialized in viral marketing where they had proven success; or they could transform into a full service ad agency with a closer relationship to advertisers, and be able to afford more opportunities to leverage content into television and other traditional media. At the time, Mekanism employees were dodging requests from clients for advertising content that was currently not a focus of the company. This put Harris and Caban in a situation where immediate action needed to be taken.
Viral marketing offers a great bang for the buck for many products and services. It is very quickly becoming an effective and low-cost method of getting a message out to consumers. With the explosion of advertising and marketing on the internet over the last decade, viral marketing has become extremely popular because of its ability to leverage the collaborative nature of online communities. There are some clear properties that a viral campaign must have in order to become successful. The message must present clear value to the customer. A good example of this is Hotmail’s free email account offering included in every email sent. This allowed Hotmail to instantly spread like wildfire since there was no cost and marketing was done automatically by the