Sounds like a chain letter sent by giggling adolescents, and that is just about what it is. But Silent Bill isn't a new kid in school who has the girls all gaga. He is a live-action video character - distributed from friend to friend via e-mail - designed to create a buzz for Motorola's new electronic "messager," the Talkabout T900.

It is all part of a craze called viral marketing, a way for companies to reach Internet-savvy youngsters turned off by traditional advertising.

"We needed to relate to younger audiences on their own terms," says Leslie Danse, a spokeswoman for Motorola, of Schaumburg, Ill. "Motorola has always been known for its good technology, but we're also known in some circles as a little grandpa who isn't up with the times."

The Silent Bill campaign aims to fix all that. As with other viral marketing campaigns, the one for Motorola involved creating a video and attaching it to an e-mail, then sending it to the 18-to-24-year-old target audience. The company hopes people who receive the message will think it is interesting enough to forward to their friends, who in turn will send it to their friends. If successful, the electronic chain letter generates attention and curiosity about the brand contained in the e-mail.

"The beauty of viral marketing on e-mail is that you are generating word of mouth, but it is word of mouth with unlimited reach," says Howard Beale, director at BlueberryFrog, an Amsterdam shop that describes itself as a "guerrilla marketing" and branding company. Motorola turned to BlueberryFrog for the Silent Bill e-mail gimmick, which was launched globally last week. "Every time someone passes on the message," Beale says, "he is endorsing it to his friends."

In addition to Motorola, companies such as Honda Motor, British American Tobacco and Nike have tried viral marketing for everything from promoting new minivans to improving their corporate images. In addition to its cutting-edge credentials, viral marketing is relatively cheap. Motorola wouldn't disclose the cost of the Silent Bill campaign, but it is estimated to have cost less than $150,000, a fraction of a typical television campaign.

In Motorola's first video, Silent Bill - who communicates with people without talking, using his T900 messager instead - skates through various urban scenes, interacting with people in a madcap way. He steals ice cream cones, plays with a puppet and wears a goofy helmet to protect him from harm. The first video of Silent Bill will be followed up by two other videos to be launched later this week.

The first set of e-mail messages went out to a database of about 80,000 people that BlueberryFrog bought from e-Dialog Inc, a US database company. Because of the nature of e-mail campaigns, it is difficult, if not impossible, to measure their reach. Beale says click-throughs on Silent Bill's Web site are one way to gauge how many people are responding to the message. So far, it is too early to tell. "We have to wait a few weeks to see if this catches on," he says.

With e-mail campaigns, the execution has to be just right in order to work. Unsolicited e-mail can be more of an irritation than anything, and with the threat that a computer virus could jump out of an e-mail attachment, the viral campaigns risk being deleted before they are seen.

"Like we are annoyed by door-to-door salesmen, we are annoyed by unsolicited e-mail," says Annicka Locket, account director for Levi's Europe at ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty in London. "These campaigns need to be incredibly entertaining or people will be let down by the whole experience."Locket helped coordinate a Europe-wide viral marketing campaign for Levi's jeans that used a puppet character called Flat Eric. He appeared in video attachments to e-mails and, without mentioning the Levi's brand, drove hundreds of thousands of people onto the Levi Strauss Web site. One reason for the success of Levi's viral campaign was that it was backed up by television commercials that reinforced the Flat Eric character.

The Flat Eric phenomenon continues to spread, long after the TV spots stopped running, and is just now hitting Japan. "It's free global promotion," Locket says.

Motorola is hoping Silent Bill proves just as popular, particularly with its target audience. To reach a different audience, Motorola also will do a TV campaign for Talkabout T900 that was designed by Interpublic Group's McCann-Erickson, but those ads won't use Silent Bill.

-- The Wall Street Journal