Advantage and Disadvantage for "The Best Job in the World" campaign

Viral Marketing Case Study (SPD4290) -

The Best Job in the World

by Tourism Queensland

in January 2009 

Advantage

Success in generating valuable PR and non-paid media coverage & reach a large audience in a cost-effective way

Tourism Queensland (TQ) broke the story via traditional media and then sustained the viral through social networks including YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. The website for the contest received a million hits the day after it was launched. By the time the campaign was done it had attracted 34,684 applicants from 201 countries and generated over $150 million worth of international publicity (including a BBC documentary), all on a $1.2 million budget.

Disadvantage

Traffic can overload your hosting bandwidth
After campaign announcement, the million hits crashed the site. In 30 hours they had 400,000 new visitors and one million hits on the second day.  TQ brought it back up it was hosted on 10 Web servers, the maximum number of servers possible, to fix the problem.

Source from:
http://www.tq.com.au/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_marketing
SPD4290 Viral Marketing by Wild Group
SPD4290 Online Viral Marketing