I recently read an article from the Wall Street Journal about Viral Video that instantly sparked some interest. It focused mainly around Judson Laipply, or as most would know him, the guy from “The Evolution of Dance” video. The article explains that when he uploaded his video on YouTube in the spring of 2006 he had little to no idea what a viral video was or the amount of success he was about to receive. Without any advertising at all the video spread across the Internet eventually reaching 100 million + views.

In Laipply’s own words he describes, “It was all just pure luck”, one of those word of mouth phenomenon’s that cannot be analyzed or mapped for future benefit. We all know in 2009, the likely hood of such a success story is beyond staggering. Possible, but your more probable to win the lottery or have the Leafs win the cup. Not only has the field of content increased beyond imagination, but also the process of marketing videos has expanded immensely past a simple upload. As a matter a fact, the article relates only uploading videos to YouTube without the aid of further marketing comparable to “dropping a grain of sand on the beach ” and hoping to have it discovered.

With the knowledge of this, Laipply moved forward with his next video releases “Evolution of Dance 2”, needless to say he took a far different approach. His first angle, find partnership, Laipply reached out and the sponsors answered overwhelmingly. His two major partners PeopleJam Inc. and Saveology.com have put fourth tens of thousands of dollars in marketing money to promote the upcoming viral sequel and pay such overhead as song rights.

Saveology, a company that advises people on finances and PeopleJam a self help company, have teamed with Laipply, himself a motivational speaker with the overall theme of self improvement and positive human spirit. With their product integration users are able to interact with various flash games and activities such as placing their head on Judson’s body among other Internet content.

Laipply knows the severity of his luck first time around and hopes to benefit from his new marketing techniques and something that most viral marketers don’t have from jump street. An extremely large following base! The video has been out since mid January and has close to 4 million hits. Coupled with the hype that it received on its countdown to launch it may very will be the best marketed Viral Video of all time.

It is quite evident as mentioned before on this vary blog that Viral Hope has gone the way of the Dodo and Viral Science is the wave of the future. If you want be successful you no longer only need great content, but it must be packaged with great marketing (SEO, building fan base etc…) and long-term commitment.

Well ok, maybe the Dodo reference is a little bleak, perhaps a better analogy would be the Siberian Tiger cause we’ve all seen one of those in the Zoo at least once and apparently there are only 200 left in the wild. Yeah think about it like that there are perhaps 200 great Viral Hopes left in the massive wild archives of Viral Science.

-Ty Huggins

Look at that, a two month gap in between posts… shameful.  On behalf of VMG to our many thousands if not hundreds of millions of loyal VMG blog readers I offer our humble apologies and our promise- nay our easily broken agreement, to put up at least one new, insightful, or at the very least incoherent blog post per month.  In the meantime thank you for your patience and without further ado, Today’s subject: “Viral Hope”

What is Viral Hope you ask?  Viral hope is something we’ve identified many brands, companies and individuals from suffering from.  It’s a condition brought on by misunderstanding the extent of the online video ecosystem.  Put simply there’s a lot of video online.  A lot.

Fact: It would take you 600 years(!) to watch the entirety of the YouTube video library.  There are 13-15 hours of video submitted to YouTube every hour.

Now, Viral Hope occurs whenever a company, brand or individual puts up a video in the “hope” that it will go viral.  There was once a time when you could argue that content was king.  Upload a funny video or a strange video or a video of someone caught lighting their pants on fire and you stood a relatively good chance of  finding a big audience online.  This unfortunately is no longer the case.  Even the best content, with the most viral potential, from the very best talent needs cajoling to get it in front of the right eyeballs. The problem is, no matter how good your content you’re still throwing a needle in a haystack hoping someone (with a lot of friends) will find it and share it.

Doing the old upload and hope is now an exercise in futility.  So what to do? We’ve been asking this question since our earliest days (and the earliest days of YouTube) when we first started experimenting with viral video distribution.  Now with much trial and error under our belts we can confidently say that we are quickly becoming masters, not of Viral Hope, but of Viral Science.  And yes there is a science to going viral online.  Certainly quality and relevance of content is still important but just as important is how that content is optimized for discovery.

In our strange economic times many brand and marketing managers may find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place. Shrinking budgets mean the cost of broadcast spots are becoming less and less feasible.  Print readership is disappearing and advertisers are jumping ship like rats on sinking galleon (sorry advertisers).  Online video has always held a great allure but little in the way of guaranteed or quantifiable returns.  That no longer needs to be the case.  With our latest viral distribution efforts we’ve achieved our viewership volume goals and then some.  But the buck doesn’t stop at view counts.  In our opinion a successful viral campaign is a blend of views generated and discussion started.  We aim to get people talking, whether on blogs or as video comments or direct video responses.  Internet communications is a two way street after all and the success of online media, whatever it’s form is largely dependent on how well it’s been optimized for consumer dialogue.  A video with 200,000 views and 2 comments is a failure in our opinion while a video with 50,000 views and 220 comments could be considered a great success.

Check out our last two viral efforts:

Volkswagon Jetta TDI - (we did distribution only, not production so please be kind)

Current stats:  248,140 views – 235 comments - 1302 ratings totalling 4.5 stars - 5 distinctly seeded blog link backs.

Originally seeded for a target viewership of 150k to 200k. Target viewership goal was surpassed 2 weeks after upload.

Motorola – MotoReel Phone Films – The Sacred Orchid - (Production and Distribution)

Current stats  187,154 views – 178 comments – 1 video response – 529 ratings totally 4.5 stars – 6 YouTube Honors including 5th most viewed video in Canada for the month of January 2009.

The Sacred Orchid was originally seeded for a target viewership of 100k.

Both spots achieved their target numbers within 3 weeks of being released, viewership and comments continue.

These were not accidents, they were not flukes, our viewership numbers are not artificially generated (no astroturfing here).  These are real viewers, making real unbiased comments, leaving unbiased ratings and sharing as they see fit.  We have become online media agriculturists, planting seeds in the right places to get the right amount of viewership nurishment.  It is a process that can be repeated, measured and refined.

Viral doesn’t have to be a dirty word anymore, online video can be embraced as a viable alternative to broadcast and print, especially when targeting niche audiences.  This is what we’re doing. This is what we’re all about.  Great creative production with quantifiable results.

Leave hope at the door and embrace viral science.  Also, tell your boss you’ve found a company that can maximize your marketing budget for 2009, you’ll probably get a promotion.  You can thank us later.

- Evan Aagaard

Partner/CD – VMG Cinematic

As a rule I generally have a low opinion of buzz words and corporate market speak.  It’s a vocabulary too often used by the uninformed trying to pose as the overly informed and in the end those fancy words we come up with to describe new trends grow stale and wind up ridiculed by just about everyone in the know.  Well at the risk of ridicule I’m going to break my own rule and become a contributor, nay a revivalist to the buzz word lexicon with “Advertainment.”  Sure it’s not my own invention and you’ll find it floating around on the blogosphere here and there, maybe in a few industry articles etc. but it hasn’t really found a catch yet.  I’m using it now because there really is no better word to describe the growing trend I’ve been seeing from big brands experimenting with long-form-video-entertainment-advertising (see why we need a buzz word?).

Of course, this is something we at VMG have always been strong advocates of, first as conscientious consumers and now as industry participants.  It really comes down to a simple conclusion that we reached many moons ago when we first cobbled our little group together: The 30-second spot is dying out, people are becoming desensitized to the repetition, the format, the chaos in volume.  In short consumers have been shutting their brains off to TV commercials for years, and yet big brands are only now starting to take advantage of the fantastic opportunities that exist online for consumer communication.

What if brands made, films? TV shows? Short films? Animations, Characters that people liked, storylines that people found genuinely compelling???? What if brands started telling stories instead of hard selling products and services?

The consumer is wise. The consumer has seen all the tricks, they know all the bargains, they’ve heard all the lines, and if they don’t they have an unlimited information resource to find them out.

Let’s imagine a future where consumers judge brands not by the full page sale announcement they see in their paper or the forgettable commercial they see 17 times a day on their TV, but on the emotional connection they have to the most recent short film or online series that brand has released. And I’m talking soft sell here.  A genuinely entertaining piece of content, humor, drama, sci-fi whatever the genre, something authentic and enjoyable to watch where you might not even see a logo or credit at all (trust the intelligence of your audience).

So there’s my deep thinker for the day, the brand-as-studio concept, creating the mutant child “Advertainment” and reaping the rewards of a truly emotional connection with consumers by entertaining them first, and selling them as a distant (and sometimes non-existent) second.

“Hey Joe did you see that new film from Heineken today?”

“No George, I’ve been hooked on that series from Panasonic… it’s awesome.”

Sound ridiculous?

Just wait and see.

-Reid

Now, they also have the option to partner with YouTube and share in ad revenues from the videos. The problem was always more about YouTube’s profit than it was about the uploaders. YouTube has become a kind of de facto public medium where consumers share and react to mainstream media images, which is often helpful for brands. This kind of arrangement could help to reduce the tension between the owners of those images and the host site.

-Nick

-Nick

-Nick

I’ve been listening to the new album from mashup artist Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis) a lot over the past couple of days and it brings up some issues in the same vein.

2006′s “Night Ripper” (torrent | complete list of samples) launched him into Pitchfork shininess, and the critical acclaim is well deserved. To give you an idea, here’s “Hold Up”, in which the samples range from Ludacris and 50 Cent to Weezer and the Pixies (NSFW):

None of the samples on Gillis’ albums are rights-cleared. The costs would be prohibitive given the volume of material, but that’s still not the main issue (the record label is called Illegal Art, after all). This is about the struggle between private ownership and public access to popular culture. The music itself reminds us of the public-ness of pop culture: the whole effect of Girl Talk comes from taking the mass of personal and cultural associations you have with Missy Elliot, and smashing them together with those about Phil Collins. It reminds you how much of your own experience, how much of our shared experience, someone claims when they say they own a music track.

While he hasn’t been hit by any major suits (as far as I know), Gillis has left himself pretty vulnerable with his carpet-bomb approach to infringement. iTunes doesn’t carry him, and Amazon only has him through third party sellers. But Timothy Gabriele at PopMatters wonders if the new album, “Feed the Animals” (buy/download) might be able to find a loophole in its pay-what-you-want distribution model:

Consumers are not being asked to give money out for the purchase of Feed the Animals. They’re being ask to donate to a musician and his label for having made Feed the Animals, which they will gladly give you for free. In this context, Feed the Animals is about as illegal as any mashup some kid in his living room designed for his blog.

Now, I’m pretty sure this line of reasoning won’t hold up in court (open source software, for example, isn’t allowed to infringe on patents just because it’s free), but Gabriele is right that the freebie option (which is at full-quality 320kbps, by the way) blurs the line between commercial artist and basement teenager. Not that that stopped EMI with the Hi5 thing – but most people (and most record companies) would want to distinguish between the two. As I argued in the EMI/Hi5 post, user-generated content can be a valuable source of buzz. The question, here as with EMI/Hi5, is whether or not the potentially valuable product exposure outweighs the danger of setting precedents by turning a blind eye to third party profit.

-Nick

“allowed infringement to go unchecked, content to profit handsomely from advertisements that appear side-by-side with infringing content, and from the draw created by their dissemination of [EMI's] copyrighted works.” (from the lawsuit)

OK. It’s understandable that EMI wants some control over how its content is used, who profits from it, and how much they pay for the right to do so. But this music-industry-has-hopelessly-oldschool-economic-model thing is becoming a tiresome truism. EMI is not going to be able to make money from teenagers using EMI songs in their homemade videos. EMI wishes it could. But that doesn’t mean the solution to the situation is to try to stop teenagers from using EMI songs in their homemade videos.

Consider two situations:

1. Teenagers don’t use EMI tracks in their videos. Neither Hi5 nor EMI profit from EMI’s property.
2. Teenagers do use EMI tracks in their videos. Hi5 profits from EMI’s property (‘handsomely’ in fact); EMI does not directly profit from its property, but it gets a mass of free advertising.

Granted, perhaps shock-and-awe tactics have their place in a solid legal strategy. But in this situation in particular, EMI has more to gain from the second situation than the first. Value is value, whether Hi5 is getting a free ride or not.

And free internet advertising is incredibly valuable. I sincerely hope, for example, that EMI’s legal team is not so zealous as to sue YouTube for the 21.6 million pairs of eyes (and counting) that graced last year’s “Daft Hands” meme (even if the star is now selling shirts):

Not to mention its 193 video responses, and copycat videos with 7.8 million views, and copycat videos of copycat videos; and that’s just YouTube.

It’s not about broadcasting anymore. The only way to truly engage with consumers is to relinquish some of the control you’re used to having over your brand. This is a terrifying prospect for people who have grown up with the security of detailed branding guidelines and a single source for their brand message. But things are going to get Darwinian fast.

EMI: The internet is here, and the songs up on its MySpace are actually pretty good. Give it an EP deal or something, at least. Before it releases its own album as pay-what-you-want and you go out of business.

-Nick

Starting any word you please with a particular lowercase letter is not a registerable trademark. And so came the imitators, seeking to capitalize on the indefatigable momentum of the 21st century’s alphabetical dernier cri. They’re everywhere. An in-classroom digital response system from MacMillan called the iClicker. An interactive shop-window touchscreen foil technology called iWindow. Even our own wine show produced in partnership with the iYellow Wine Club.

But now Apple has announced a new suite of synchronization tools (extending the iSync/SyncServices platform?) that lets users synchronize mail, contacts, calenders and more between their Macs, PCs, and mobile iDevices. They’ve called it “mobile me“, and I have a hunch that there was more to the decision than the fact that they’d already used “iSync”.

Is this the first step in the abandonment of the iBrand? Has our generation’s favourite letter finally passed into history? Is the iMac just a little too 90s? Have iWords become so cliché that even Apple marketers cringe when one of them says, “Why don’t we call it iMobile?” Maybe the loss of brand specificity is becoming a problem.

But “me”? I know we’re trying to stick to the user-focused branding, but I’m not convinced enough time has passed since Microsoft’s WindowsME debacle to cleanse “Me” of its connotations of (1) Microsoft and (2) useless nonfunctional crap.

Whatever happens, eventually we’re going to run out of English first-person singular pronouns. And then advertisers are going to be in trouble.

-Nick