Firebrand

1. Funny spokesman
2. $100,000 budget for a set
3. Talking tige…

… there is no recipe for a viral video!

The most powerful medium of this time in marketing is also the most elusive. It’s the viral video. If we knew the recipe, than advertisers would be leveraging them so much that they would loose power and ability to spread. Much like mass media advertising, there is only a certain amount of space for viral videos. In stead of air time, it is mind share. The public has a very set appetite for viral videos, and when blasted with too many, they tend not to pass it along.

One company that gets it is Old Spice. Old Spice has hit the holy grail in that they have had so many successful virl videos that hundreds of thousands of young men looking at their You Tube channel to see what they come up with next. They are the fifth most subscribed sponsor channel of all time. Their videos have an unfair advantage towards going viral because of the 300,000 or so views a video gets just being on the Old Spice channel.

Another thing they have been able to do that eludes most viral videos is stay on message and on target. Their ads speak directly to the product and in a way their target market of young men respond too. Most company sponsored viral videos have nothing to do with the company or even the brand, except a 5 second logo flash at the end of the video. All of Old Spice’s videos talk about the product, and they don’t even comically over exaggerate the features of the product. They just associate it with fictional gods of manliness. They don’t say that if you use Old Spice, that you will instantly become a pillar of manliness. In fact they say that you will just smell like one? That association plays to the product attributes and the aspirations of their target market.

That leads to the most important part of a viral video: speaking to something visceral at the core of a segment of people. If it doesn’t hit someone in the gut in 30 seconds, than they wont pass it along. A common misconception is that a viral video has to speak to everyone; quite the opposite. It needs to speak to some people deeply. With Old Spice, that deep sentiment is the need for young men to feel manly and desirable. With Nike’s “Write the Future” video, it was the cultural diversity and cultural pride of the World Cup. With the Tom Tom’s Darth Vader recording studio video, it was about seeing someone who is known to be serious in a comedic way. Wit Hi Tecs “Walk on Water” video, it was making something you knew was impossible seem possible.

A more simple thing to learn from Old Spice is that you need to take alot of swings of the bat to hit a home run. They produce alot of videos. For every video that Old Spice has that goes to 3 – 6 million views, there are 2 that are at about 1 million views or less. When you strike gold, you aren’t going to know exactly how and why or if that is even repeatable. But the why doesn’t matter, the video going viral does. You just need to experiment.

Another repeatable thing Old Spice uses is brevity. Thirty seconds or one minute and that’s it. The principle reason Old Spice does this is to fit into the time slots of video services intro / outro slots. Most viral videos are around 2 minutes 30 seconds, but being brief gives you a higher percentage of being passed along. If people feel like they are committing their friends to watching a long video, it had better be captivating. A short video is just a snack.

Something also it keep in mind is directing your cinematography so that the video can be understood when viewed small. We are getting the opportunity to have HD video now, but that doesn’t mean people are watching it in HD. They are watching it from their Facebook news feeds, or huddled around a 19″ monitor in a cubical. Make things large, graphically simple and only have one area of focus on screen at a time.

Consider using an audio logo like Old Spice, but we already have a post on that.

While creating a viral video may seem like a black art, it is doable. If you don’t think that you can make something that can get to 5,000,000 views than just remember that if it reaches a few thousand people who are your direct target market, than it was valuable. Happy experimenting.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an award winning industrial designer who works with large multinational brands everyday designing retail displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.

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The views expressed on this weblog are mine alone and do not necessairly reflect the views of my employer, FX Displays.