Examining Viral Ad’s Attributes and the Cause of its Spread on the Internet

While traditional marketing is a kind of marketer-to-consumer communication, viraladvertising is consumer-to-consumer communication. Advertisers believe that their messageswill be viewed favorably if they have been recommended by a friend or a social networks’member. This research aimed to examine the characteristics of viral advertising. The researchstrategy was experimental. The Mazandaran University students were selected as thestatistical population of the research. A cluster sampling was applied to select the researchsample. Then, the selected sample was equally divided into test and control groups. Four viraland four non-viral ads of unfamiliar brands were shown to test and control groupsrespectively. The data was collected through questionnaire. Reliability of the questionnairewas assessed using Cronbach's alpha. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics andparametric tests including Kolmogorov-Smirnov, one sample t-test, two independent samplest-test, and Spearman correlation. The results indicate that there is a positive and significantdifference between the emotional content of viral ads and non-viral ads. In addition, there is apositive and significant correlation between emotional content and ad forwarding intention