Please Steal This Ad
How freebooting became a vital piece of “going viral”
First off, let’s define freebooting:
“The act of taking digital media and uploading it as your own without the content creator’s permission.”
At first glance (and in most instances) this is a problem. And it’s a big problem, especially on Facebook. You’ve probably watched freebooted content and not even realized it, from popular Facebook pages that don’t seem to make anything of their own, but instead share lots of other viral videos.
But while this system is detrimental to content creators,
it’s an untapped opportunity for advertisers.
Freebooting is essentially sharing on steroids. Facebook, and other social networks reward natively uploaded content. And certain Facebook pages command massive audiences, and the content that they share is distributed far beyond the reach any brand page could hope to attain.
As an example, Sandy Hook Promise recently released “Evan”. For that campaign, we simply wanted to get our message in front of as many people as possible. So, we turned to the idea of freebooting. How could we get other people to upload our video instead of trying to aggregate all of our views in one (brand-owned) place.
The results were clear. Relinquishing “ownership” of the literal mp4 file, and allowing others to upload the video was critical to it’s success.
On Facebook alone, non-brand channels drove 30x the number of views compared to the video that lived on our brand channel.
How can anyone plan for that?
You can. And you can’t.
We did take proactive steps to get the ball rolling. We reached out to Joe Hanson of It’s Okay to Be Smart, and got him to post the video natively. But Fox and Yahoo happened without our involvement. Since Joe’s video took off immediately, we think it sparked others to freeboot the video as well, as is often to case when videos take off on Facebook.
Another more nuanced aspect of freebooting is something called GIF-booting
GIF-booting consists of creating GIFs of the highlight moments from a video, and then uploading that, or creating an article with several GIFs. This raises another opportunity for content to be created to be “GIF-able”.
Overall, it’s important for brands to begin giving up control of their content, to let go of the aesthetics of the view count on their video, and instead shift their focus to the potential views that could occur beyond their channel. And as they shift that focus, to begin to take advantage of an ongoing media trend in freebooting.
If you enjoyed this brief rendezvous, why not recommend it? And check out other articles myself and my colleagues have written around the ever changing media landscape on our Communications Planning Blog.
