There is viral, and there is truly professional material. The latter includes the EpyBird production’s take on the Belagio fountain. This video, by the now famous Fritz and Stephen is one of the best out there for the Diet Coke-Mentos work, as well as what constitutes good viral material

I don’t mean to be too harsh on Agency.com, working in and coming from the agency world, but I would have expected them to ‘roll big’ in another direction, and give new meaning to a client pitch. If you’ve worked on the client side, you’ve probably sat through ‘creative’ pitches that looked more like beauty pageants and stunts, and wondered "where’s the work, old chap?" Arguably, this is more on the lines of demonstrating the ‘work’ they can produce, but as many have argued, you have to do better than prove you can shoot a video and upload it to YouTube. (Two Chinese fellas who lipsync badly can do that too!) They are indeed gutsy in puting their reputation on the line at the expense of winning an account. Agencies need to take risks. Heck, all creatives need to step out of their comfort zone and take risks. But I am not sure if the Subway pitch in this format was worth going viral. I kept looking for that denoument, that big idea that would hit us between the eyes and believe Subway would not be able to resist these guys, but it never came. What has ensued is a debate about what constitutes a viral campaign, and the agency’s setting up of a blog on this topic, sort of acknowledges that there’s a lot to learn.

Contrast this to the Mentos-Diet Coke video, and they dont just prove they can shoot video but really do something creative on camera, and this is what’s gets people talking –positively. Isn’t that the whole idea of going viral?

Draper Fisher Jurvetson which supposedly coined the term ‘viral marketing,’ talked of it being an "implied endorsement from a friend." Many people have emulated the Diet Coke-Mentos idea, and the videos –at least the good ones- gather endorsement as they are passed along. But an agency’s goal of winning an account, does not require such audience endorsement. If this is what it was looking for, what does that say about it being able to understand its target audience?