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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 At this year's Cannes Lions, jury wanted to show the world of advertising has changed, so they and gave the Grand Prix to Dove’s Evolution spot.

The effort was rewarded for two reasons:

1.    It shows that there’s life beyond the 30sec television spot.

2.    It demonstrates the importance and power of corporate social responsibility. It’s not just a statement, it’s an action; Dove isn’t just commenting on the state of women and beauty, it’s actively trying to do something about it.

The problem is that the media world has changed so dramatically in the last 6 months that it might be impossible for a brand to replicate the success of Dove. The ad was truly viral; it was even seeded by the writer directly on YouTube and took off from there.

So what’s changed?

1.    Everyone’s doing it- YouTube is a changed environment with hundreds of advertisers and entertainment companies all competing for attention alongside user generated content.

2.    Viral media has become a commercialized industry where you have to pay the big bucks to get success. There are commercial seeding companies who you pay to get the word out and YouTube has now become a fully-fledged media company. You can now buy viral success by running your ad on the front page of the site, but it will cost you $60-$80,000 a day to do.

Dove was a pioneer in this space and was rightly awarded for its efforts, but brands looking to replicate the success of Unilever’s brand are going to find it tough. Unilever loved the case because it turned a $50,000 investment into tens of millions of dollars of media coverage.

That’s the potency of the story and the bit that every client likes and salivates over. The problem is that it’s not going to be easy to achieve any more because of a radical shift in the economics.

If your brand is brave and gutsy enough to get behind a powerful and challenging socio-cultural idea, execute with creative brilliance and support it with a smart CSR program, you will get people to pay attention, but it's unlikley you will be able to do it for $50k.



Posted by Ed Cotton Will Ferrell's Landlord film has been an incredible success, generating over 15 milion views in a short period of time. Interestingly, the film isn't available on You Tube and can't be embeded in other sites. The only way to view it is on Ferrell's new site Funnyordie.com.

Forbes Magazine has an interview with the Funnyordie.com's founders.

Here are a couple of highlights.

I'm sure there's something to the instantaneous piece of it too. This stuff doesn't have to sit in development for years.

Absolutely. You just go do it. Grab a video camera and do it. You don't even write a script; you just get the beats for it and do two takes, three takes at the most. And because of that, some of them aren't going to be great, and some are. But the whole spirit of it is, Who cares, let's just do stuff and have fun with it.

Do you see a trend emerging? Will other celebrities start to make their way online too?

Yeah. And I hope they do it in this way, kind of messing around and loose. I think if celebrities start entering it with a team of professionals, agents and executives, and the Internet short becomes really thought out, I think instantly people will smell that out. So I think the spirit of it has to be sort of screwing around, to be real and not overly premeditated. If you want to see that, you go to big movies or television--and that's a great thing, but the Internet has a looser form to it.

It's surprising few celebrities have gone down this path, but we can obviously expect hundreds of films to be hitting the pipes in the next few months, to compete directly with user-created content. Celebrities clearly have the name recognition advantage and a fan base, but can they be as creative as everyday folk and can they generate more than one hit?

Again, it's another example of doing more stuff, for less money and experimenting to see what sticks.