What goes into Viral video marketing? Here are some great examples of popular viral marketing videos, and how you could create your own marketing success.
Dove Experiment
The Dove Real Beauty Sketches is a video with a statement. It is almost a social experiment showing how women describe themselves, and how others describe their outer beauty. This three-minute video stood out in 2013 as one of the most popular branded videos. They take their time to explain what is happening to their audience, and they show a lot of emotions, which is exactly what their audience in looking for. This is what makes this very sharable and social media friendly.
However, this video did not thrive on emotional resonance alone, it was backed-up by a rock-solid media planning, distribution and PR strategy. Making is viral video is not easy and doesn’t just happen, it takes a lot of planning, and a lot of luck. It is like the winning the marketing lottery. There are some tricks to enhance your chance of winning it, but major cases will be purely accidental.
Pepsi Max – Prank
Prank videos have been popular for a long time, and are likely to stay popular forever. Creating this kind of timely content is actually really important for viral videos. This video is now quite old, and it is still funny and relevant. Professional car racer Jeff Gordon is in disguise and taking a non-expecting car deader on a test drive. Using a camera hidden inside a Pepsi Max soda can to film the reactions of the car salesman.
Three – Dancing Pony
Three made a very easy to remember, funny, sharable video by making a pony dance. This video is great social media content, if you watch it till the end or not. It is easy to like and share which is what viral videos are all about. The video is original, easy to understand for everyone, you don’t need to have a specific interest for Three’s services, because this commercial has very little to do with their Telecom and Internet services. It does promote Internet and content sharing, which this video is a perfect example of.
GoPro
GoPro is known for their commercials being shot on the GoPro cameras, and overall the things they film are pretty impressive. In this commercial a GoPro is attached to a fireman’s helmet, who goes into a burning house and saves a kitten. Brings it outside and gives it oxygen to save it’s life. A perfect example of something that is highly sharable (we all know how well cat videos work), and inspiring content.
Heineken
What men would call a true talent show. This commercial is funny, mocks the endless talent shows we have on TV. This show “Men with Talent” is all about what men can do with Heineken beer. They can juggle beer filled glasses; they can play an emotional song in harmony, carry the most amount of beers from the bar to their group of friends. It is all about the smiling faces and cheering men; everything men who drink Heineken long for.
BMW
With the “Oldest trick in the world” commercial from BMW they show off the speed, power and precision of their S 100 RR motorcycle. The motorcycle is attached to a tablecloth, the table is set and fully decorated with expensive glasses, flower vases etc. can the motorcycle pull away the table cloth fast enough to leave everything on the table standing?
Viral video marketing
It is important to take into account, “branded content almost never just goes viral on its own, there is almost always a large media spend behind it, or at least a funded kick-start to get the initial interest” says Allan Blair from digital agency Tribal Worldwide London.
When companies with a more limited budget want to make a video go viral it is important to define what “viral” entails for that specific company, comparing it to the corporates with high media spending is not the aim.
How to go about it
Making a video with the sole aim for it to go viral should never be the objective. Aim to make videos with great storytelling that is timely and powerful. Releasing micro content, which is generally slightly cheaper to produce, will allow the company to create a higher volume of videos.
According to Kate Cooper, managing director at media agency Bloom Worldwide, micro content is typically one of the following things:
- Content that is planned around a special event or national day, such as Valentines Day, or New Years.
- Real-time content, not easy to produce because you only have a matter of hours to turn it around. If you capture the moment you can achieve a lot of traction.
- User generated content is used by many brands, they take the social media content that their users provide and use it for their campaign.
Even on a more limited budget great value can be created by interacting with your customers online.
Do you want to create your own timely, relevant and competing content? We would love to help. Get in touch! Fill out the contact form or give us a call at 020 3637 1467