Anti-marketing activist Pete Roberts (my description, not his), spotted what appears to be a viral campaign gone wrong. He spills the beans here on a purportedly 'grassroots' campaign to undermine Google's position as the Internet's leading search engine by claiming Google's success is an attack on freedom of choice. The site (or should that be campaign) - Information Revolution - appears to have been constructed by digital agency Profero for its client Ask.com (although Yahoo! is also a client too).

Here's a taste of the comments added to the site:

"I’m really pleased that people have seen this sham for what it is. Shame on ‘ASK’ for being so duplicitous, and feigning such a pathetic attempt at masquerading as bastion of ‘information liberation’. Clearly on this occasion ‘ASK’ fooled none of the people none of the time." posted by Por Que March 13th, 2007 at 10:12 am

"if you go to ask.co.uk and search ‘information revolution’ then the first result is mysteriously this website. compare this with any other search engine! You are totally gaming the results, making people even less likely to trust you than they already do!!" posted by mralbion March 13th, 2007 at 9:25 am

The thing I don't understand is, presumably Profero deliberately selected the cheesy giveaway design, Citizen Smith rhetoric and also left their domain registration obvious to find, because they were happy to be found out, in some kind of ironic 'we get that the joke will be on us' way?

But if so, surely they would have expected the negative backlash?

All of which begs the question, is all viral good viral?