We’ve launched the latest Virgin Mobile online viral and buzz marketing campaign, featuring an East End gangster spoof.

We’re planning, seeding and tracking a new Virgin Mobile online viral and buzz marketing campaign - our fifth for the brand - featuring a ’scorching’ spoof of East End gangster flicks to support Virgin Mobile’s latest sales promotion.

James Kydd, brand director for Virgin Mobile, said:

Continuing our successful series of online viral campaigns with DMC, this time a spoof ad is being used to convey our brand’s renowned quirky sense of humour. The ad will be available exclusively online. It aims to generate buzz, raise awareness and entertain culture-driving, technology-savvy users who are early adopters of viral material.

The campaign’s spoof ad, called ‘Scorching Girls’, was created by Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R. In the ad, an unexpected victim is gaffer-taped to a car in a scrapyard. At a nod from a tough-looking East End gangster, the victim (a mobile phone) is then torched by bikini-clad, flame-throwing henchwomen. The spoof wryly notes that viewers may want their own mobile phones to have a similar ‘little accident’ in order to take advantage of Virgin Mobile’s hot offers. A microsite at www.scorching-girls.com offers the ad for download and enables visitors to find out more about Virgin Mobile’s latest deals. The microsite can be accessed directly from a hotlink at the end of the ad clip, as well as via buzz links throughout the web.

The viral campaign is being seeded as ‘advertainment’ content via our online influencer network, and featured on music and lifestyle websites. Our online film-tracking system will also provide real-time accountability of the ad’s views and hotlinks as it’s passed around, in order to quantify the impact the campaign has on brand awareness.