Introduction 3 success of the Karen26 film. `It is the most successful viral advertising ever. We have gotten through the media noise. And it has cost the same as a 30-second advertising spot that will appear a few times on TV2', stated Peter Helstrup from the advertising firm Grey, makers of the video. 2 However, the feeling of jubilation was soon diluted as the backlash kicked in. The Karen26 video had been distributed using viral seeding. VisitDenmark had paid a seeding company on a per-view basis to get the Karen26 film to critical mass. The video had therefore been pushed out through a number of channels (targeting news organizations and bloggers alike), and the seeding push had been fantastically effective in generating coverage and views. Once a video or piece of content is established using this route, it can then spread on its own, and Karen spread far and wide. This sort of virality is hard to activate (as we'll see later), but effectively the more coverage that content receives, the more people talk about it, resulting in more people going to view the content and more people talking about it. The whole process becomes self-fulfilling, and this is what saw the view count for Karen's appeal grow so quickly. #unKaren and the spirit of HC Andersen But Karen was not real. She was played by a professional Danish actor, Ditte Arnth, although this was not acknowledged in the video, and at no point did the film state it was created by VisitDenmark. There was no reference in the script or the video description, no logo or trailing of the video with a VisitDenmark message or tag. From news organizations to bloggers and general YouTube users, people believed the video was genuine. The video views leapt as people jumped at the chance to help, so naturally when it was revealed that the video was a promotional mechanism a large number of those who had tried to help now turned against it. The initial reaction of VisitDenmark (and their agencies) was to defend the campaign. The VisitDenmark tourist organization called this video `story telling on YouTube in HC Andersen's spirit', 3 and in Danish newspaper Politiken Dorte Kiilerich, CEO of VisitDenmark, was quoted