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The French act Daft Punk have been around for over 10 years, but have recently returned to dominance through a series of impressive live shows.



I was wondering if all those hand videos on the internet had also helped the band in someway?

It all started with this one in June 2007.



This was the first and has over 12 million views, that's six times the number of views the band's concert video above achieved!

By August someone had reworked another Daft Punk song using their hands

That one has over 1.2 million views.

In October, a "bodies" version emerged which has achieved over 1.5 million views.



There are close to 500 films of people trying to Daft Hands and despite the fact this meme is months old, people are still doing it.

It's a great example of herd mentality in action. The idea is really simple, but there's just enough complexity to it that makes it interesting and it willingly encourages others to show they can do it.

There's are some lessons here if you want to use people as your media and get some viral buzz going.

1.Start with a strange and original take on something

2.Keep production limited to low or no production- make it easy to do and replicate

3.Set it up as a challenge- have some complexity

4.Make it invitational

5.Dont' forget the herd- copying is good, it means you belong



Posted by Ed Cotton A post appeared on Techcrunch recently the created something of a frenzy around the ethics of viral videos and their marketing.

For any of you who believe ethics are involved, forget it. It appears people are doing whatever they can to game the system to their advantage, employing tactics that would have client and agency lawyers ready to jump from the 20th floor.

Here's are some of the highlights from the post.

The Film

1. Make it short: 15-30 seconds

2. Design for remixing: create a video that is simple enough to be remixed over and over again by others.

3. Don’t make an outright ad: if a video feels like an ad, viewers won’t share it unless it’s really amazing. Ex: Sony Bravia

4. Make it shocking: give a viewer no choice but to investigate further. Ex: “UFO Haiti”
Use fake headlines: make the viewer say, “Holy shit, did that actually happen?!

5. Appeal to sex: if all else fails, hire the most attractive women available to be in the video.

Seeding

1. Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.

2. Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but if we get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect.

For all I know, agencies might be doing this, but if they aren't, someone else will be. The world has gotten tougher, alot tougher. Not only is this challenging on moral grounds, if you are prepared to put that aside, there's an incredible amount of  work needed to make viral success happen.

Thanks to Podcasting News.




Posted by Ed Cotton The latest offering from Dove.




Posted by Ed Cotton The Dairy Milk Gorilla ad seems to have had an impact. The data from Alexa shows traffic to the microsite eclipsing the volume of the sites of Cadbury's competitors.

Clearly if awareness is the goal, this viral effort has made an impact and broken through. The probem is that the decay seems pretty steep.

At their best, these viral efforts have short shelf lives (1 week or so) before consumers move onto the next thing. How do you sustain success?

The future is about producing more because:

1. You need to experiment to see what sticks

2. Once you have success, you need a quick follow-up to maintain impact

Also, there's a quality factor emerging, this spot shows that not all virals need to be lo-fi. Increasingly, clever post production is arriving on the scene.

Who ever said viral is a cheap way to get your name out there?


Posted by Ed Cotton Doing something genuinely different and surprising, is more important than ever in a cluttered world.

Often, because it’s so hard to get, achieving a surprise creates its own problem; the tempting trap of a formula; the belief that recent success can be repeated if similar patterns are followed.

In advertising, success creates a dilemma; stick too rigidly to the formula and risk ending up looking too similar to your past success.

Sony’s UK Bravia spots are a perfect example; the first was incredible and the second one was merely great.

In a world where more and more content is being consumed on the web, often based on recommendation, users demand surprise.

Who said this was an easy business?

Certainly not Bill Bernbach.

“However much we would like advertising to be a science-because life would be simpler that way-the fact is that it is not. It is a subtle, ever-changing art, defying formularization, flowering on freshness and withering on imitation; where what was effective one day, for that very reason, will not be effective the next, because it has lost the maximum impact of originality.” 



Posted by Ed Cotton The recent web sensation Jonathan, better known as “Zombie Boy”, has achieved hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube and national acclaim.

What did he do? He simply answered “I like turtles” to a reporter who asked him what he thought of his zombie face paint at the Rose Festival in Portland.



Why is it brilliant? It's a great example of something that was truly spread virally and still became a cultural phenomenon  – just look at the remixes and the merchandise for sale (currently on hold until official permission is given from Jonathan’s mom).



And since it's had such a huge impact, it’s gotten us thinking about our business and viral marketing. Because let's face it, while there are success stories (think Honda’s Cog video and the Blair Witch Project) it’s easier to count the failures. 
 
Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, though popular within our industry, was mostly spread by the media. And no one believed (and for good reason) that something like Ford’s Sportka viral video was actually produced independently. 

Worse, there are thousands of others that couldn’t even infamously fail. They just never got any attention at all.
 
So how did the short news clip of a 10 year-old from Oregon become “famouser” (in his words) “than a lot of other people”, literally on accident, without spending a single media dollar?

Maybe because it's not a marketing message. It's real and impossible to fake. And most marketing is the opposite: planned, over scripted and usually focus-grouped to death.
 
Jonathan was funny, simple and honest. And marketing, if it’s good, can be too.


Posted by katie facada