Have you seen the "Office Berserker"? If not, check out the clip below. It made the rounds through YouTube and various blogs last week, even including high-traffic sites like gawker.com. While many bloggers speculated that it was a viral marketing campaign, the Russian director who made the clip to plug a new film didn't admit until this week that, no, it wasn't real, and that, yes, it's an ad. Mission accomplished.

It's not news that viral video advertising has become increasingly popular medium. If you hit it big with a video, it can propel your company to success for only a fraction of the cost of mainstream advertising. Even big business, who's got the bucks to pay for serious marketing, has turned to shilling their products via Internet videos and letting YouTube and MySpace users do the legwork. A couple weeks ago we wrote about a viral YouTube video plugging Levi's that apparently has done more for the brand than most of their mainstream advertising.

But can viral video advertising work for small businesses? Sure it's cheaper to disseminate a clip via YouTube than it is to purchase commercial spots on network television. And, if the ad becomes popular and is widely disseminated, it gives a business a shot at success that mainstream advertising couldn't achieve.

Reality check. While it's cheap to make these videos, you've got to be really smart, clever, or funny to make a video that's going places. Viral video advertising also probably isn't for every business. I'm not saying that small business owners shouldn't give it a shot. If you've got a handheld, a USB port, and a laptop, why not? There's no harm in having an online presence on YouTube or elsewhere to help get your company's name out there—unless your video is egregiously bad or offensive. However, it strikes me that there's a massive gap between the reality of how well most of these videos really do, and the media hype about how awesome viral is.

What do you guys think?

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