Viral ads often have little in common with the
product they seek to promote
What is viral video?
A viral video is a brief video clip, usually no longer than a few minutes, which gains greater exposure as viewers share it via internet or mobile technologies.
The mediums through which viral video is distributed include email, instant messaging, blogs and video sharing websites, the most popular of which, by some distance, is YouTube.
People often make and upload home-made video clips or upload TV, film or music clips for entirely non-commercial reasons – invariably ‘for a laugh’, nostalgia or simply because they want to share something they really like with others.
But increasingly viral videos are also used as a marketing tool, as a form of viral marketing, which harnesses social networks to create brand awareness, sell products and promote events, films or bands.
How popular is viral video as a method of advertising?
What isn't in doubt is that advertisers are waking up to the waning power of traditional advertising and the enormous potential of viral advertising.
However, Big Business rarely understands and successfully imitates bottom-up revolutions straightaway.
Companies are justifiably wary about representing their brand in an environment where many viral videos have spawned parodies and been ridiculed on forums. However, although these spoofs often provoke furious legal threats, companies occasionally relent, sometimes even encouraging their propagation to help raise brand awareness.
Sometimes it’s difficult to tell whether it’s a joker doing the spoofing or the company themselves.
Why does viral video have such enormous marketing potential?
Saturated with hackneyed TV ads, billboards and junk mail, the consumer is increasingly weary of traditional advertising methods. To get their attention many brands have made tentative forays, with varying degrees of success, into this exciting new medium.
Companies that can replicate the success of amateurs whose videos, often made on camera-phones, notch up thousands of views, can achieve wide-reaching brand exposure at very little cost.
All the marketeer has to do is produce a video, post it on a video sharing website and email the link to a number of people.
Thereafter the video – so long as it is effective – will amass ‘hits’ without any additional investment of time or money on the company’s part. This is because its popularity is perpetuated by the viewers, who pass on the link to their colleagues or friends through email or instant messaging.
Essentially, viral videos work in the same way as word-of-mouth marketing, albeit the mode of transmission is digital rather than verbal.
This contrasts sharply with TV or radio advertisements, which are charged on a per-broadcast basis and reach only the audience watching or listening at the time of airing.
Why would anyone do the marketeers’ job for them?
People only forward on links to viral videos that shock them, confound them, make them think, or, more often than not, make them laugh. A viral video is only ‘contagious’ – can only spread easily – if the viewer enjoys watching it.
How much exposure, and how quickly, can a video get?
Basic mathematics dictates that word of an entertaining video will spread at an exponential rate, registering a huge volume of hits rapidly.
Let’s say that of eight people who initially see a video, half deem it worthy of forwarding to friends and colleagues. If these four people each forward the link to eight addresses, then 32 people will receive it.
Repeat these ratios and you’ll see exponential rises in recipients in every round of forwarding: 128, 512, 2,448, 9,792, 39,168, 156,672, and so on…
It’s easy to see how a popular video can quickly register hundreds or even thousands of views.
And what if a video isn’t popular?
Conversely, few will forward an uninspiring viral video and casual browsers, given the volume of competing material, are unlikely to alight on it by chance. Such videos don’t so much sink without a trace as sit impotently, gathering dust in a deserted corner of the net.
TV and radio advertising costs a lot more, but at least if you fail to entertain your audience, many will still sit and endure your advert anyway. Though your advert might grate, if it makes the audience aware that your printer cartridges are 15% cheaper than the competition, you’ll still find that you start selling more printer cartridges.
It’s also easier to target your audience. For example, if you sell gardening equipment then an advert in Gardening World magazine or in an ad break during the TV programme of the same name, then it’s safe to say that you’re targeting the right audience.
So viral videos are a risky enterprise?
Yes and no.
Yes, in the sense that it’s not easy to make ads so good that people actually choose to watch them.
But no, insofar as viral video needn’t be an expensive form of marketing.
Thanks to the affordability of technology and the fact that amateurish videos often have an appeal all of their own, you could even produce one in-house for next to nothing. Capturing the YouTube zeitgeist won’t be easy though, and you’ll probably have more chance of success hiring a marketing company.
Dynamis, the web media group behind this website, came up with a viral featuring a mysterious masked individual collapsing cardboard boxes. A whirlwind hit it wasn’t, but it amassed about 4,000 views and has a decent star rating – not bad for something that was fun to make and cost next to nothing.
However, while it might cost you little in terms of money, it can potentially damage your reputation. Anything posted on YouTube is wide open to ridicule on the appended comments section and parody videos.
So how do you make a viral video entertaining?
By de-emphasising the brand and product you’re marketing for a start. An effective viral video shouldn’t resemble an advert at all, at least not in the conventional sense.
This marks a continuation of an existing trend in TV advertising, where ads have moved from descriptions of a product’s actual, measurable virtues, to attempts to associate them with intangible virtues such as sexiness, coolness and happiness, and finally to almost sidelining the product altogether. This surely reached its apotheosis when an advert for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk featured a gorilla (or rather, a man in a gorilla suit) playing the drum intro to Phil Collins’ Something in the Air Tonight.
If people feel they’re being overtly marketed to they won’t want to forward the link on (“FW: Check this out, it makes you want to drink lots of coke!”). The brand on successful viral adverts tends to be apparent in a discrete way.
Isn’t it just young people who use YouTube?
The huge number of clips of old TV shows Suggest otherwise. Type in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads on the search engine, for example, and you’ll see plenty of uploaded clips from the 1970s show with wistful comments such as “when comedy was good…”.
Contrary to what you might think, the group which uses YouTube the most, according to a 2006 eMarketer audience report, is aged between 35-64, which accounts for 54% of usage. The 2-34 demographic accounts for 41.3%.
The power of the internet is attested to by soaring online advertising revenues and declining TV audiences. According to the UK Advertising Association, online advertising revenues are likely to overtake those of TV by 2009.
On the other hand, not everybody uses the internet. If you’re aiming for a mature market then you might wonder whether the older demographic uses the internet often enough to warrant advertising through that medium.
But the internet is no longer the preserve of geeky young men: women aged between 25 and 49 spend more time online than their male contemporaries, and over 65s now spend more time on the internet than any other age group, averaging 42 hours a month compared to 25 hours for teenagers.
So viral video is a big part of the future…
It’s inevitable that advertisers will spend more on internet advertising as time goes on. Viral video, the potential of which has barely been tapped, will be a central plank to online advertising strategies, and will lead to many more spectacular, multi-million-hit successes and abject, barely viewed failures.
