It’s a childhood staple, it’s amusing, it has many vibrant colours that catch and engage the eye. The storyline is simple but engaging.

And it really reminds me of walking past the roadside food stalls in Delhi - sensing adventure, anticipation, surprise, but also fearing potentially disastrous consequences.

For a lot of illustrators, authors and marketers, Green Eggs and Ham provides a common point of reference for their images, stories and unique selling propositions.

As Faris points out, borrowed interest can be a useful tool across all these applications.

It’s just the marketers that can manage to spend a million dollars, remain true to the vision of the original creator, and still be chided for cheapening and despoiling that vision.

Emerge from your marketing coffee klatch with the goal of developing something “viral,” and borrowed interest becomes a lot more appealing.

After all, the appeal of borrowed interest means that someone else has done all the creative heavy lifting. Whether through artistic style, lyrical quality or appropriated cultural properties, the work of the marketer is simplified AND magnified.

That all to say that the effort by Yobi.tv, Spam I am, Or A Different Sort of Beginner Book: A Viral Marketing Story Suitable for Bedtime, caught my attention.

In a “hey, this book could be about me” sort of way. It’s a viral effort designed to speak to people who spend a lot of time thinking about viral efforts.

In the annals of Green Eggs and Ham appropriation, however, I prefer the Moxy Fruvous treatment. A great live band, they don’t seem to place much emphasis on developing an online presence (their website still brags of being Y2K compliant). The best I could find was a fan video: