The winners of this year's international viral awards, Germ 2, have been announced after the public voted for the most 'infectious' entries. Check out the winning entries here – and find out what's happened to last year's winners.
The Germ 2 awards celebrate the best work by members of the public as well as commercial viral campaigns, and this year Dazed was invited by organisers Channel 4 and viral site Bore Me to sit on the panel that chose a shortlist of the best entries from which the public voted for the winners; the winning entries featured cars made of cardboard and tower blocks covered in paint.
Best Video Viral
A team of six students won the Best Video Viral title for their piece 'Cardboard Cars'. The light-hearted viral features them trying to cruise around the city in an eco-friendly but completely useless vehicle. Winners Layefa Agwosi, Aimi Awang, Jihye Baek, Sally Barrett-Spring, Sarah Cupitt and Alice Dupre are illustration and animation students at Kingston university in south London.
Men Working
Best Still Image Viral
Kieran Murphy's 'Men Working', was voted Best Still Image Viral.
Men Working
Best Interactive Viral
Ben Cusack won the Best Interactive Viral award for KooZac, an old-school style video game, complete with falling blocks and simple maths puzzles, which has had over 400,000 plays to date.
Best Commercially Produced Viral Title
The Best Commercially Produced Viral title, the only award for professionally made pieces, went to Rebel Virals for their promotional viral featuring a paint-splattered man and town scene.
This year's prizes include viral commissions for Channel 4 (with budgets up to £2000), a year's subscription to Dazed, and PSPs and games. Short-listed and winning entries will also be shown as part of the annual viral exhibition at London's ICA later this year.
Winner of last year's best image viral was Neil Hepburn (AKA Beau Bo D'Or) with his Camden spoof sign image shown at the top of this page, offering street directions such as "charity muggers, traditional muggers, skunk, happy slappers, mushrooms". His creation of Kate Moss and Pete Doherty reworked as a portrait of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady created a media furore after an appearance on B3ta.com in 2005. "It was pretty controversial but I wasn't taking the piss", Hepburn explained. "It was meant to be a comment on how the red-tops were demonising them". Hepburn now regularly contributes work to the Channel 4 News blog (ITN), and his latest work in The Guardian has moved him into the arena of heavyweight political cartoonists such as Martin Rowson and Steve Bell. On the right you can see Neil's entry for this year's competition.
LA-based director Chris Litten, aka Dick Thompson, clinched last year's Best Movie Viral by lighting up the judges with his domino-effect cigarette packs, entitled 'Brand Loyalty', and somehow done in one shot. "I accepted the point was that a small change causes a similar change nearby," he commented, "and another, so initially I thought it really was a quit smoking campaign, but looking at the description on You Tube; "smoke 'em if you've got 'em", I changed my mind."
Soon after, Litten was snapped up by Nestle to direct virals for their Butterfinger campaign. The site scored over six million hits, with one million video views. Planning to shoot the sequel to "Brand Loyalty" this summer, he laughs that his cigarette packet collection "has grown to over three thousand packs".