Viral Marketing efforts are growing in popularity from small ventures to large companies. USA Network has created an impressive viral marketing campaign.

Last summer, USA created a new show called Burn Notice about a spy that is kicked out of his original job and just dropped into Miami with no money, work history, credit history- basically without any identity. According to the show, when a spy gets kicked out of intelligence they call it getting burned and they say that a burn notice has been issued. The show has incorporated viral marketing since its inception, but below is a recent example.

The website lets you generate a customized video that adds your friends information into it suggesting that everyday citizens may have been burned that the same way the show depicts a spy being burned. Click here to see an example.

Once the video has been viewed, you can send it to more people, keeping this viral mail going. The key thing here is that viral email success comes from people forwarding the email to other people and getting as many people to see the video click or other item as possible. By letting people customize the video USA is making it more to send to friends and others.

Viral marketing can be done far less elaborately but USA Network has created a model that others can look up. It will be interesting to see if they publish any numbers about their success with this project.