Roddick Vs. Pong Viral by Amex - Rule 4 “get ready to scale”
Nice little video from Amex, and i guess an example of “integrated viral” because along with the video Amex has also created an online flash game at http://stoppong.com.
Clearly they had some scaling issues as people logged on to play the game as I got this error when I tried to play it:
In my 3 rules of managing viral marketing I had said “Experiment, Monitor, and Respond”, so i’m not sure if this would fall under the “Respond” header, or maybe there’s a 4th rule, “prepare to scale”.
BTW the 3 rules for managing viral marketing sound great in French:
trois règles du marketing viral que tous les chefs marketing devraient connaître and Marketing Viral, encore quelques articles
Merci beaucoup 
Update: Just noticed Joseph Jaffe blogged about this as well
2 Comments, Comment or Ping
Michel Leblanc
You are most welcom Karl and they did sounded good in English as well. That’s why I translated them to share your insigths with a greater population.
Aug 22nd, 2006
PsychicParrot
In defense of Amex, I’d love to say that those involved *could have been* or *where* ‘prepared to scale’, but in all fairness no-one expected to have to scale up to 3.7 MILLION uniques in less than a day (yes, that’s just one day of the campaign!!). The fact is that this game was so incredibly popular, it came as a suprise to even the most techy techy. I don’t think there are many campaigns set up, initially, to take that kind of bashing from 3.7 million people all trying to download a 3d game at the same time
So yeah, be prepared to scale … you never know, it might just get so popular it’d bring down the whole server
Sep 10th, 2006
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