There was a time, sometime in December, when it was impossible to walk down the street in an Indian metropolis without hearing a snatch from ‘Kolaveri’. The song, recorded by a group of Tamil actors and singers, has now been watched over 42 million times on the internet website YouTube; Sony Music, which owns the copyright, has seen a comparable number of downloads. Its amateurish, relaxed feel served to enhance its popularity. The group’s leader, the actor-singer Dhanush — born Venkatesh Prabhu Kasthuri Raja — pointed out in the course of a seminar on viral marketing at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad last week, that the film with which it is associated — 3 — received an enormous amount of publicity as a result. The film will now be released not just in Tamil, but also in Telugu and Hindi; and instead of just 400 prints, as originally planned, over 1,000 will be screened. When viral marketing works, it works spectacularly.

<p><table width='100%' border=0 cellspacing=0><tr><td style='FONT-FAMILY: Arial; FONT-SIZE: 18px; FONT-WEIGHT: bold; COLOR: #0253B7;'>The secret of ad energy  </td></tr><tr><tr><td style='FONT-FAMILY: Arial; FONT-SIZE: 11px; '>The 

The secret of ad energy

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