How to tell if your viral’s going to be a hit
October 20th, 2009 -
We have been doing a lot of tracking looking at traffic numbers, comments, and ratings for viral videos. The results are often disappointing. Most “virals” don’t go viral. A common characteristic in virals is that they are commissioned, scripted, shot and even released without any testing. Given the nature of the internet, this is nuts.
YouTube, Vimeo, Daily Motion don’t charge you to post a video. The client can easily send a link to a few dozen testers to see if they like it. Even before that stage companies like Unruly Media (who specialise in viral seeding) can take a look at your script and tell you if it satisfies key criteria. It should be (according to them) Funny or Sexy or Shocking or Spectacular or Original or Moving or Illuminating.
In short the internet lowers the barrier to testing an idea, to see if it really works. Then you can commission more of a great idea and quietly forget about a bad one.
Really good creative – of course – can do a fantastic job for a brand. Little Gordon – the campaign for the website caterer.com – has had an extraordinary 2.7m views – only 75,000 were paid for with viral “seeding”. [Thanks to Steve Filler - of Unruly Media - for the stats] …
Motrin disses baby slings in viral ad, sparks outrage
November 21st, 2008 -
Motrin is a US pain killer. They have posted a video ad on YouTube from the perspective of a Mom who resents having to carry a heavy infant and is looking for pain medication to cure her back problem. (Why doesn’t she just stop carrying the baby, you may ask.) This is the wrong message …
Media (and buzz) moves online
October 7th, 2008 -
The huge success of Tina Fey’s Saturday Night Live parodies of Sarah Palin (see above) has pointed up something the TV networks increasingly see as a great new opportunity. Great TV is finding a big part of its audience online. Fey’s hilarious (and kind of affectionate) Palin impersonation in the VP debate parody has received …
Targeting influencers – Cadbury case study
April 12th, 2008 -
Joe Marchese over at MediaPost has a good post on the Watts vs. Keller controversy. He, too, thinks that the truth lies in a middle ground. Influencers are important, but not for viral marketing. Hubs/mavens/folks with high “betweenness centrality” scores are helpful in that case. The experience of our client the UK confectionery manufacturer Cadbury …
Targeting influencers with virals “doesn’t work”
April 10th, 2008 -
Duncan Watts is a Yahoo researcher who has done detailed work looking at the best strategy to launch a viral campaign – the kind of campaign which is aimed at getting the consumer to pass the idea along. Watts compares campaigns which targeted viral communications via “influentials” in the social network with campaigns which simply …
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