Influx Insights Tag Feed: viral

daft punk's hand herd

Influx Insights — 2008-01-22T14:46:26Z

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

ad agencies and viral video- do we know what we are up against?

Influx Insights — 2007-11-23T20:58:50Z

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

dove is back

Influx Insights — 2007-10-02T04:59:10Z

The latest offering from Dove.

Posted by Ed Cotton

a gorilla makes cadbury famous for 6 days

Influx Insights — 2007-09-11T04:56:21Z

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

the power of surprise

Influx Insights — 2007-07-18T03:59:30Z

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

i like viral

Influx Insights — 2007-07-17T00:52:35Z

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

the art of the tease

Influx Insights — 2007-07-15T19:42:16Z

Spotted in a bar in Belize.

The intrigue of that poker game.

To get people to talk, they've got to know something about it. They've got to be made
curious. You've got to get them asking questions.

It's that (secret) in this "ad" that does all the hard work here.

Posted by Ed Cotton

too much video content

Influx Insights — 2007-07-11T14:37:08Z

When a top VC says there is too much video content (See WSJ-Kara Swisher's interview with Roelof Botha of Sequoia- below), there's certainly a problem out there. It seems to be getting worse, which is making it so much harder for virals to break through and ads to be seen. This is clearly the motivation behind the Publicis/Droga initiative to build a "YouTube" for ads. The battle for attention, really sucks.

Posted by Ed Cotton

dove's evolution is the last of its kind

Influx Insights — 2007-06-24T20:59:46Z

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

what's wrong with viral marketing?

Influx Insights — 2007-05-14T03:26:54Z

Duncan Watts, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, was recently interviewed on the topic of viral marketing for HBR’s Ideacast series.

Watts started out by explaining how viruses work, highlighting how it’s well known to science that a small number of people start epidemics. For a virus to become an epidemic, it requires each infected person infects at least one other person. Infect less than one and a viral epidemic doesn’t occur.

In science terms, an epidemic requires a “reproduction rate” of 1.

Watts believes marketers need think beyond viral, to an alternative that he calls Big Seed Marketing. This demands marketers go beyond the analogy of viral, where current thinking demands that viruses start with a small number of people. His recommendation is not to replace traditional marketing with viral, but introduce viral elements to traditional programs.

Simply put, pay for an initial base and then add tools to help spread the idea.

Watts used Procter and Gamble’s launch of Tide Cold Water, as an example of Big Seed Marketing in action. P&G wanted a true viral effect, but in tests campaigns generated “reproduction rates” that were significantly less than 1.

Procter then sent the campaign to its mailing list of 900,000 people and discovered that it took 20 people to infect 1. Although the impact wasn’t as viral as they had hoped for, they still added 40,000 people for no cost. Importantly, they didn’t start out small hoping to seed the idea; they started with almost 1 million people.

For years we’ve been using the “viral” in viral marketing, thinking and hoping that it’s marketing that works like a virus, it turns out we were wrong on two fronts; there’s no such thing as a truly viral marketing campaign and if you want to get the next best thing, forget small, you need to start out big.

diageo- get consumers to be interested in you

Influx Insights — 2007-04-30T18:31:20Z

Yesterday, beverage giant Diageo, held an annual investors conference, where it into considerable detail about all aspects of its global business.

Marketing got a seat at the top table and considerable time and attention to explaining the company’s thinking about the new environment and how it’s responding to the challenges.

4 things emerged from the presentation.

1. The company clearly understands the new challenges of the marketplace.

2. It has a new marketing model.

3. It knows the implications.

4. It’s acting on it.

Diageo is be forging ahead of its competition with marketing innovations in viral, digital and experience based platforms. The work for Smirnoff Iced Tea received special recognition; according to Diageo’s data, the viral “Tea Party” film generated 3 million+ internet views and 48 million PR media impressions.

brands and online video- 7 new rules

Influx Insights — 2007-03-26T23:24:06Z

Here are 7 new rules for brands wanting to play in the new landscape of online video, it's a follow up to the previous post on big brands experimenting with online video.

1.    Creativity Rules- The bar has been raised to 11

In the past, when brands used to look at creativity, they were comparing themselves to each other, so the bar was pretty low, often anything that got people to laugh, was deemed a success.

Now, engagement has gotten so much harder. The competition is that much tougher and new modes of consumption place new pressures on content to be compelling. The switching cost is very low.

Brands are used to competing in a war that was often based on throwing lots of money going at the best talent and the best and most media. The playing field has changed. With such low barriers to entry- everyone with an imagination is now a potential competitor for your audience's attention.

2.    Brands Must Push Boundaries

Consumers are flocking to entertainment that pushes extremes.

a.    realness and rawness- reality tv
b.    violence and language- premium cable-like HBO
c.    speed and spontaneity- user generated

Brands have to be prepared to go there; otherwise their content will always be second-tier in comparison to the competition.

3.    Give Up Control of Content

Consumers want content distributed in the places they inhabit, they don’t want to be forced to consume it on your website. Content needs to be widely distributed and consumers should be allowed to place it in their own social media environments, like on My Space pages.

4.    Study the Landscape

Brands must have their pulse on this rapidly changing landscape. This isn’t about knowing who the next YouTube is, but learning how consumers consume this new media and understanding what forms of content appear to be working best.

5.    Partner

There’s a lot of merit in what Coke did, they went directly to the source with a proven track record of viral success and worked with them. Imagine if Budweiser, instead of trying to build it’s own network, had given some seed money to dozens of people who had already achieved viral success, the result of BudTV might have been different.

6.    Encourage the User to Engage

Brands are so used to the broadcast model, that they forget the internet offers countless opportunities for the audience to interact with the content. Whether this is just simply allowing them to comment on the content or remixing it, you have to let the user in.

7.    Simpler is Better

It’s easy to get carried away with the belief that your content is so compelling you can create multiple layers around it. Make it too complex and you will end up turning people away. Think video games, the best sports games have an instant play function, where you can just play, they also have layers and added complexity, if strategy is your bag.

Overall, brands face a radically transformed landscape and in order to play, they have to be prepared to experiment and be willing to learn from failure.