Disney Virtual Parade Goes Viral

Users can animate family and friends as part of a “What Will You Celebrate?” Disney promotion.

A Web campaign to get visitors to design themselves and their friends into a customized Disney Main Street Parade has produced thousands of parades in two months and plenty of viral buzz for Walt Disney World Resorts.

The interactive promotion was created by digital agency The SuperGroup to give a viral spin to the company’s “What Will You Celebrate?” integrated media campaign.

Users who go to the site can pick from a number of reasons to have a parade, including birthdays, family reunions, congratulations, first Disney visits and “true love,” and create a banner to mark the event. They can then upload up to four photos to create custom characters that will be integrated into the parade video.

Those characters can then be outfitted with costumes, placed on a float and filmed as part of a Disney Main Street parade, complete with the iconic Cinderella’s castle in the background.

A recorded guide talks users who may not be computer adepts through the process of creating and styling the custom characters.

The resulting 60-second video can be sent out to friends, posted to a MySpace page or embedded on a personal Web page.

The “Magical Parade” microsite launched on Feb. 1 and in that time users have produced more than 125,000 parade videos.

“Working with Disney has been a real treat for us because from our company’s inception, they’ve been a major influence and inspiration,” SuperGroup president Chris Wallace said in a statement.