Holiday Inn's recent viral e-mail program publicizing Best Breaks, a breakfast promotion, is an example of this. Having already conducted a traditional marketing push for a program that kicked off last year, the budget hotel chain was looking for a way to freshen up its messaging during the promotion's final months. It decided on a rich-media, viral e-mail campaign designed by media technology firm Oddcast. The Talking-Egg-A-Gram is a cute greeting card-type application that people can send to their friends. Though it had some of the inane catchiness of the late-'90s viral e-mails a la the Dancing Baby, the Egg-A-Gram is in fact wired into a business trend for the company: the fact that more and more guests are using the internet to book reservations. It also has the metrics that prove its usefulness. Over a two-week period in February, more than 5,000 people who visited the Holiday Inn website used the application; three quarters of those who receive the e-mail open it, and just under 40% forward the Egg-A-Gram to other e-mail addresses.

"From a branding perspective, one of the things we know about online and particularly with viral elements is their ability to connect with and grow a larger community," says Mark Snyder, SVP of brand management for Holiday Inn Hotels and Resorts. "Whether a transaction results from the viewing of a viral message at a point in time, we do believe it deepens the connection of the brand with the user. If there's a transaction that will occur two to three weeks from now, we feel we have a better chance at being at top-of-mind for their lodging choices as a result of this."

About Oddcast
Founded in 1999, Oddcast (www.oddcast.com) develops and distributes rich media software solutions for the e-learning and e-marketing markets. The company's flagship product, the VHost™, provides a robust, easy-to-learn, end-to-end solution that enables organizations to sign up, design and program interactivity into existing e-learning and e-marketing platforms, all within a single interface. All of Oddcast's products are web-based and ASP-hosted and can be delivered to any device even in low-bandwidth environments such as PC's, CD-ROMs and mobile devices.

The company has won numerous interactive design awards and currently serves approximately 600 customers, including Coca-Cola, Cisco Systems, Intel, L'Oréal, Chrysler, Sony, Colgate, Viacom and McDonald's.