Viral Advertising: the Relationship between Emotional Content and Ad Forwarding

While traditional marketing communication is a kind of marketer-to-consumer communication, viral advertising is consumer-to-consumer communication. Advertisers believe that their messages will be viewed favourably if they have been recommended by a friend or social network’s member. This research aimed to examine the characteristics of viral advertisement. Strategy of the research was experimental. Students of the University of Mazandaran were selected as population of the research. Cluster sampling was applied to select the research sample. Then, the selected sample was equally divided into test and control groups. Four viral and four non-viral ads of unfamiliar brands were shown for test and control group respectively. The data was collected through questionare. Reliablity of the questionare was assessed using Cronbach's alpha. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and parametric tests including Kolmogorov-Smirnov, one sample T-test, two independent samples T-test and Spearman correlation. The results indicate that there is positive and significant difference between the emotional content of viral ads and non-viral ads. There is positive and significant correlation between emotional content and ad forwarding intention.