When it comes to balls the golf industry is dominated by one powerhouse. When your ball has been used to win 85% of tournaments and you outweigh your closest competitor by a factor of eight there is not much to worry about in the way of competition.

Sometimes great things come from those who look like they are out of the race. In this case it is Nike Golf’s Juice Marketing Campaign. Nike put together a series of videos featuring two researchers, a high speed camera, and the juice ball being fired through random objects in slow motion. Besides being fun to watch there are a few lessons that we can learn from the juice. Nike has done a great job of converting video views to email addresses. How do they do it?

1. Want to see more?
Juice offers a free preview of things to come. Just before impact the video stops and users are notified that the video will available soon. Enter your email and your birthday and you will sent a link when you can come back and watch the full version.
2. Want to be the first to know when the green beer gets blown up? Sign up to be the first to know when your favorite object will be blown up. First to know means first to forward. First to forward means social currency.
3. Want to make your golf buddies laugh? Juice makes it very easy to forward. Enter your email, their email, a message, and you will have your friends rolling courtesy of the juice

Nike has done a great job of collecting information by rewarding their users with access to content, and the social currency of being the first to forward. Does a good golfball have to blow through lava lamps, Valentines Day Gifts, gingerbread houses, mayonnaise jars, and gumball machines to win tournaments? No. Do today’s marketers need to understand how to get their branding message out virally in order to succeed in todays competitive business environment? 100%.

Elfyourself.com from OfficeMax is a simple concept and an amazing example of something going viral. A user uploads their picture, uses their phone to record a greeting, and is transformed instantly into a dancing elf. I know a good viral concept when my own mother forwards it to me. Elfyourself has spent two years in a row at the top of Holiday Greeting sites. They have logged over 120 Million visitors who have created and forwarded over 75 million elves around the globe. Word of Elfyourself started as a small leak in the blogosphere and on social networks and made it all the way up to prime time coverage from USA Today, ABC World News, CNN, and the Today Show. Elfyourself is a genius concept which has fueled a combined time of more than 15,000 years of people creating elves and laughing at their friends, all framed by a holiday border and the OfficeMax Brand.