Guidelines and Examples for Viral Video Marketing Circa 2013
This was supposed to be an eBook, but I never got around to distributing. I have not looked at this in years, and did not alter anything. There is no surefire way to achieve viral success, but these are some general guidelines I have identified through my extensive video experience, at least my opinion in 2013. Enjoy.
Internet usage and dependency is rapidly growing and there is no doubt that internet marketing is the future of advertising. However, it can be very costly for a company to market themselves online whether it be with Google AdWords or through other means. There is one way in which companies can reach out to millions of potential consumers without putting in much money or effort. This is through viral video marketing. A viral video is an online video that becomes very popular through the means of sharing.
It seems very easy to make a viral video. If a cat playing a piano is capable of acquiring hundreds of millions of views on the internet, what is stopping a multi-million dollar corporation from doing the same? The truth is that creating a successful viral video is not as easy as it may seem. Many companies attempt to create a viral video to promote their products or brand, but fail in the process of doing so. On the other side of the spectrum, there are companies who have successfully created viral videos. What is it that distinguishes the successful viral video marketing campaigns from the unsuccessful ones?
While it is not possible to come up with an exact formula to make a viral video, previously successful viral marketing campaigns do share certain aspects that contribute to their success. Following these guidelines can greatly facilitate the process of making a video popular on the internet.
A successful viral video must have great shareability.
Viral video producers must create a video that their audience would be willing to share with their friends in order to spread the video and make it go “viral”. Determining what types of videos people would be willing to share is not as difficult as it may seem. Producers of viral videos must think about what types of videos they themselves would be willing to share with their friends. If they make a video they’re not willing to share, chances are, their audience will not share it either. One way in which companies make a video more shareable is by including celebrities. People are very likely to share a video with a friend if they know that their friend is a fan of the particular celebrity featured in the video. There have been many popular viral video campaigns featuring stars such as Kobe Bryant, Jeff Gordon and Kyrie Irving, which will be discussed later in this book.
However, acquiring one of these celebrities is not very feasible to small companies, only to larger corporations. A much more feasible option is to pair up with internet celebrities, who have gone viral before and are likely to do it again. These are people who have obtained their fame, or infamy, online. One example of this is with the user WafflePwn on YouTube. WafflePwn is famous for his series of viral videos called “Greatest Freakout” featuring his brother who “freaks out” and he manages to capture it on video. The channel owner has admitted to the videos being staged, but people refuse to believe him and his new videos continue to get millions of views. A small company collaborated with Wafflepwn in a video that staged a promo audition for the company. The video has gotten several million views and has gotten the small company plenty of desired traffic as well.
Sweet Brown is the name of yet another internet celebrity that was able to collaborate with a small company in order to produce successful viral video marketing. Sweet Brown is notorious for her video “Ain’t nobody got time for that” which was a news report in which she was interviewed after running out of a burning building. The internet embraced her after they fell in love with her over reactions during the interview. A small dental company decided to work with Sweet Brown promote their service. Since the internet is very familiar with the name Sweet Brown, they were excited to hear that she was featured in a commercial and shared it with their friends. This resulted in many millions of views and plenty of promotion for the dental company.
There are many ways in which companies can make their videos more shareable. The utilization of celebrity figures is just one of them. It is important to keep in mind to produce videos that oneself would be willing to share with friends. One can look back through Facebook messages with friends or even emails and see what kinds of videos get shared more frequently and perhaps emulate that for more virality.
Collaborating with other companies can result in great success.
What’s better than creating a great viral video that will bring great promotion to your company? Creating a great viral video that will promote multiple companies. This has been done numerous time and has proven very successful. For example, Pepsi Max decided to make a viral video featuring Jeff Gordon. Jeff Gordon is no amateur when it comes to viral videos. His name is widely known for being a great racer and drifter. This video shows Jeff Gordon going in and pretending to prank a car salesman. I say pretending because the prank is obviously staged and the car salesman is obviously in on it. Anyways, the video has Jeff Gordon under disguise to parallel just how the new Pepsi Max has zero calories in disguise. This advertising is not subtle at all and could easily be a failure if not executed correctly. However, Pepsi is capable of creating a great video that seems like a legitimate, unstaged, prank to the general audience. The beautiful part about this video is that Pepsi also worked in collaboration with Chevrolet to promote their Camaro. This product placement is much more subtle than the Pepsi can. Jeff Gordon shredding through the streets in a Camaro while the car salesman freaks out gives the Camaro a great image of being very powerful and capable of great performance. Viral video marketing works best when the product placement is very subtle, so when collaborating, Pepsi might take all of the credit for the advertisement, but Chevrolet receives just as many benefits.
Another viral video in which Pepsi collaborated with another company was with their famous “Uncle Drew” video which featured Kyrie Irving. This video disguises Kyrie Irving as an elder who tears up the basketball court after a player is injured and must substitute out. It is stated that this is a Pepsi advertisement from the beginning, so that is not very subtle. The subtle collaboration is with Nike. Nearly everyone on the court is wearing Nike apparel, and those who are not have their brands blurred out. The most obvious part about the Nike collaboration is when Kyrie Irving offers to switch shoes with someone who is wearing what he calls “hospital shoes” while he is wearing a pair of Nike sneakers. Regardless, this collaboration was very subtle and difficult to pick up. Nike currently dominates the world of basketball in terms of image. It is very valuable to Nike to have their brand associated with basketball and because of that it would make much sense to want this subliminal message of associating their brand with basketball to be emitted to the audience of the video. To this day, the video has tens of millions of views and has proven very successful in terms of being a viral video.
Not only must one determine the content and topic of the video, but also the styling.
The styling of a video can have a very large impact on the effect that the video has on the audience. The company creating the viral video must determine whether a professional video styling or an amateur video styling is more appropriate for the message they wish to emit. While the obvious assumption may be that higher quality video will result in a better advertisement, sometimes giving an amateur feel can be more effective. Take this “Dynamite Surfing” video for example. This video depicts a bunch of youngsters in holland which, due to lack of waves, decide to throw dynamite into a pond and make their own waves. The quality of the video is very amateur. The camera is shaky and the video is dark and blurry. Due to the styling of this video, many people believed that the stunt was in fact real. The stunt turned out to be a promotion for Quicksilver, and the end of the video was simply a Quicksilver logo subtitled “original thinking”. The popularity of this video has much to do with the styling.
Amateur video quality served two purposes in the dynamite surfing video. The first purpose was to make it more believable that the video was created by a bunch of teenagers with dynamite. With higher video quality it would have become immediately obvious that the video had been professionally produced and that it had been fake. The second purpose that this low quality had was to ease the computer-generated imagery. The stunt is faked and the teens did not actually throw dynamite into a pond. It was all done on a computer. It is more difficult to tell when something is computer generated when the quality of the video is lowered. Of Course, there are instances in which a higher quality video could be more effective. The video quality is something to strongly consider prior to creating the video.
Once the video is created, it’s important to get it out there immediately.
The process of gaining momentum and views is called “snowballing”. Acquiring views on videos is completely exponential. The more people see the video, the more people will share the video. When a video relies on shares to gain more views rather than searches, it ends up filling an exponential equation, so it is important to begin the snowball as large and as quickly as possible.
Giving a brand new video a boost can be done in various different ways. With the proper contacts, a tweet or a FaceBook post can go a long way. If a celebrity collaborated with the video, as recommended above, a tweet or post from them can send a large portion of their fanbase over to the video. From then, the fans themselves will share the video and begin the video’s virility. If contacts are unavailable, great success can come from other forms of social media such as Reddit. The users of Reddit determine what becomes popular on the website, so they set up a perfect example for something to “go viral”. With millions of users, it can be a powerful tool for distributing a video out into the world.
All in all, it is very crucial to quickly gain momentum when a new viral marketing campaign is released. The goal is to make it a “hot” video and that is why many views very quickly is much prefered than slow and steady views. The virality of a video is highly dependant on how quickly the video can get around.
Return on Investment on Viral Video Marketing
The success of a viral video is completely up to the audience. Whether or not the audience decides to share a video or not determines the success of a viral video. This being said, it is very difficult to have an estimate on the return on investment prior to releasing the video.
Return on investment is calculated by taking the difference between gain from investment and cost of investment and then dividing that difference by the cost of investment. Since companies have little influence on the gains from investment, the best way for them to increase the return on investment is by decreasing their costs of investment. Reducing the costs of investment will make the numerator of the return of investment equation larger while making the denominator smaller. This causes the return of investment to be much higher.
Companies must make the difficult decision of whether spending more money on a video will make the video more successful and thus give them a greater return on investment. Due to the uncertainty of the success of viral marketing, this form of marketing can be seen as a gambling aspect of advertising. While television advertisements can guarantee a company a certain amount of viewers at a certain time, viral marketing cannot make such guarantees. Gambling generally has a bad connotation in society, but in this scenario, it is not risky as long as companies maintain their cost of investments relatively low.
There have been many successful cases of viral marketing, some of which were low budget videos, while others had very high budget. Although a higher budget means a higher risk, it all comes down to what is done with that budget. Early in the year 2012, an organization called Invisible Children set aside millions of dollars to produce this film to raise awareness on a current issue. This campaign was called Kony 2012. Invisible Children was able to come out with a 30 minute film informing the audience about what is happening. This film was highly successful, reaching over 90 million views just a couple of days after it was released. This film informed viewers of a problem going on in Africa and convinced them that the only ways in which they could help were by either donating to the cause, or sharing the video. Thousands of people donated to the cause, but millions of people shared the video. It got so popular that is gained attention outside of YouTube, where it was originally uploaded. It obtained the attention of many news outlets, not for the subject of the video, but for being popular.
However, this strategy may not be as applicable for other types of companies. Invisible Children was a non-profit organization which were raising funds specifically for the film. The funds used were not retained earnings, rather donations from the general public. This being said, they did not have much to lose anyways, had the film not have been successful.
It is important to consider subtlety when performing viral marketing.
There has been much debate on how much subtlety should be included in viral marketing. Some believe that people will not be as willing to share a video that is an obvious advertisement, thus the video should be very subtle about the advertising. Others believe the exact opposite. Others believe that it is wrong for a company to go and try to trick the viewers into thinking that the video is not an advertisement in the first place. Looking back on viral marketing campaigns, the most successful ones are in fact the ones that are subtle about their advertising. There are some exceptions such as the ones that utilize previously “online famous” characters such as Sweet Brown, mentioned previously.
One of the most successful viral marketing campaigns on YouTube was for Hi-Tech footwear. Hi-Tech produced a video in which a group of guys claim to have discovered a way to run on water. The main focus of the video is the act of actually running on water and how they were capable of developing the technique. Out of the 3 minutes and 14 seconds that the video lasts for, Hi-Tech footwear is only mentioned for a couple of seconds. Even after watching the video several times, it is difficult to pick up that it is a viral marketing campaign for Hi-Tech footwear. The combination of a mind blowing video and very subtle product placement resulted in a very effective viral marketing campaign. The video made brilliantly made it seem as if Hi-Tech footwear was a key component of being able to run on water while not revealing that the video was actually produced by Hi-Tech.
There was so much controversy about whether or not this running on water was real that the film producers had to make a second video revealing that it was faked and made to promote Hi-Tech’s new line of waterproof footwear. Even after that video was created, many people continue to believe it was real. Nonetheless, Hi-Tech went from being an unknown brand to gaining fans of their product for simply making a video. This is exactly the type of response that many brands strive for in their own viral marketing campaigns, and it could not have been achieved if it wasn’t for the large amounts of subtlety in their product placement.
When done correctly, originality can greatly contribute to viral marketing success.
In 2010, Old Spice began a marketing campaign that went viral. They created a video unlike any others on the internet at the time. Lucky for them, the viewers embraced the video and shared it with their friends. The video gave Old Spice deoderant a connotation of being very cool and great while still keeping the video hilarious to the extent that viewers would want to share it. This is very special because viewers of online videos are much less likely to share a video when it is promoting a product. However, Old Spice was capable of making video so enjoyable to the viewers that it they shared it anyways.
This video was so popular that viewers demanded more and since then, Old Spice has made many more versions of the same video. This goes to show that if a company can do a great job at knowing what their intended audience would want to see, they can make a quality video and become successful.
Professional help is available for viral marketing
There are several companies which specialize in viral marketing solutions for large companies. Rubber Republic (http://www.rubberrepublic.com/about/) is a company that works with making viral videos for larger companies. In the past, they have worked with big names such as Fiat, Mercedes, Peugeot, Audi, Gillette and many more. Rubber Republic offers companies a chance at obtaining some really high return on their investment on marketing, potentially much higher than other advertising mediums.
Rubber Republic has developed methods of nearly ensuring that a video they create will go viral. They have much experience with creating viral videos in the past and they know very well what type of content will be interesting to internet users and what type of content people are willing to share. They have many ideas that are applicable to a variety of products with a variety of effect on the viewers. Most recently, Rubber Republic had a very successful marketing campaign for Audi. This video included the new Audi SR4 and had these cars play paintball with each other. The video is not subtle about being an advertisement in the slightest, but the awesomeness definitely makes up for it. Not only does Rubber Republic come up with great ideas about their viral videos, but the video production is also superb.
After the video is created and uploaded, Rubber Republic’s job is not done. They need to get the snowball effect started by promoting their video. Rubber Republic has accumulated a growing list of celebrity contacts who are willing to share a video like this once it is uploaded. Whether it is a tweet or a facebook post, these people really help the videos gain the crucial beginning momentum.
Rubber Republic seems to mainly work with large companies and it may be too expensive of a solution for small business owners, even with great ROI. Rubber Republic is not the only company of it’s kind. I am sure that a small business can find a more affordable solution to their viral marketing needs without having to do the work themselves.
Conclusion
Viral marketing may seem as a great way to promote a product or service for a cheap price. The truth is that not all viral marketing campaigns are successful. It may seem as if a large portion of these campaigns are successful because you only hear about the successful ones as the unsuccessful campaigns never become popular. High returns on investment are possible, but not guaranteed. The beauty of viral marketing is that the investment is generally very low, so failure is not very costly.