Bike Hero and Viral advertising

A question occurs to me: what does viral marketing sell to us? The easy answer is the advertised product, but advertising has been about, for the last eighty years or so, selling not the product but emotions. It has been about convincing the person that they want the thing because it gives them X. Status, security, comfort, completeness, the selling of things in a want-based economy is less about the thing it self and more about how it makes the consumer feel. So what does viral marketing do? Consider Guitar Hero, a recently exposed viral marketing campaign by ad agecy Droga5. We see in this video a fairly creative and original treatment of a familiar game, and in it are numerous post-media forces: democratized film making, application of beloved content to new mediums, mashup, and irrational or unusual visual representations. But what is this selling to us? Group identity? That can't be it because as soon as the ad is discovered as a fake, the group turns of the advertisement. A slick, vacuous purely aesthetic image? Not likely because such "art" has to be evaluated by a group, and i dont think favoriting it on youtube is evaluation enough.


These are just thoughts, but this is a much larger idea i don't have time at work left to consider. Your thoughts?