Have you ever thought about creating a “Viral Video” to promote your company? Imagine how much business you would get if you had a video that was so awesome that it was played on YouTube.com millions of time. What would be the impact on your business if top news shows like CNN, Fox News, The Today Show, and Good Morning America talked about your video and played it over and over again for their audiences. What would you do if Oprah Winfrey called and said she wanted you on her show to talk about your video? Viral videos spread like wildfire and the best of the best of them get amazing publicity that could multiply your income in ways you could never imagine.
Viral videos are the definitely the “talk” of the marketing world. Everyone tosses around the phrase. Everyone dreams of having a viral video of their own. But let’s talk about what a viral video really is. If you ask your own marketing guru or web designer about, his description will probably be wrong.
Here is the my definition:
“Viral” means that other people are promoting it for you. If it is a video, then people are sharing the video, emailing their friends about it, and the number of views is based on the enthusiasm of the public to promote it for you. You cannot just make a good video and call it “viral”. Viral is the effect of word-of-mouth as an explosive force. If you make a video and some people watch it, that is not viral. If you make a video and some people watch it and tell a few friends to watch it, that’s not viral, but its a start. Going “viral” is like having a new hit song. It shoots to the top of the charts because people want to see it over and over again and want all their friends to see it too. There is a frenzy. That frenzy is what going viral is.
Many companies talk about creating viral videos, but what they really want is a good commercial that they just call viral. Viral videos are rarely commercials. People do not become nearly as enthusiastic about commercials as they do about funny short videos. The trick is to deliver great entertainment and let the marketing message take a backseat. You do not have to eliminate all marketing. But you will fail if you think the whole world is going to get excited about sharing your video.
There are exceptions to that principle. If your marketing video has such a special offer that people want to share it, you can create a viral commercial. But you have to be very careful about that. The best example of that is when KFC launched their “free grilled chicken” coupons on the Oprah Winfrey show. First, they spent a fortune to get the ad on Oprah. Then, millions of people reacted to the free offer and began downloading coupons like wildfire. Not only that, but they were all printing many copies for their own use and telling all their friends to do the same thing. KFC probably gave away 5 or 10 dinners for every human that responded to the ad and millions of people responded to the ad. KFC has to immediately stop the campaign and put signs in the restaurants that coupons could be redeemed for rain checks. This was a clever way to restrict coupons to one-per-household and to spread out the economic impact over time. Many people never called in for the raincheck, so in the end, KFC saved themselves from millions in losses. This campaign could have cost KFC a billion dollars. I don’t know the final numbers, but the emergency freeze on the promotion was evidence that KFC could have been put into serious financial trouble with this attempt at viral marketing.
The more practical approach to viral marketing is to create a video that’s primary objective is to be contagiously entertaining. Then use subtle product placement or brief ad shots to accomplish the marketing objective. Even if you do nothing other than share your web address, that will be enough marketing. The video is a gift to your viewers, the minimal advertising will work if you just trust the distribution.
Here is an example of the recent Evian Commercial. This one went viral in a big way. The fact that it is world-class production work and the ultimate cuteness of it caused it to go viral. in this case, the product placement was not enough to meet the marketing goals, so they added a few slides in the front, middle, and back. Even with the unobtrusive ad slides, you can feel in your heart that even those slides detract from the entertainment value of the video. If you watch the video without the slides, you achieve an entertainment factor of 10 out of 10. But with the slides in, a momentary “oh, this is a commercial” though passes through your mind and the video is now a 9 out of 10 or 8 out of 10 depending on how annoying it is to you once you realize it is a commercial.
Many people who start watching a video will stop before the end of the video. Whether they are bored, distracted, of maybe the video is repetitive. Maybe the video is so entertaining that they can’t wait to share it and become so impatient that they don’t finish watching it because sharing the video becomes even more urgent. It’s an interesting phenomenon. You have to get your brand message in during the first few seconds of the video. You can do it again at the end, or as Evian did, also in the middle of video. This poses the challenge of putting in your commercial, but getting to the entertainment content before someone stops the video. A 3 to 5 second commercial within the first 15 seconds is probably all you can get away with.
The real challenge for clients is that if they are going to invest in a marketing video, they are going to have to spend far more for a first rate entertainment video than they will for a typical commercial. Then they are not going be able to incorporate very much marketing or branding in the video. Would you spend 100 times more on a video that has only 5% of the brand message? Or would you rather spend far less on the video and have 100% marketing value? Choosing the right answer is based on how many people will view the video. If you can get 10,000,000 people to see your viral video, then the short brand message still got you in front of a lot of potential customers. If your more typical commericial only reaches 10,000 people, did you really get a better deal? What is your return on investment? Return on investment can occur in two ways. How many seconds of brand image are in your video times the number of viewers tells you how many seconds of branding you got for your investment. Divide that by your spend, and you get a cost-per-second for brand exposure. The other method is to examine actual sales generated from the ad. If you can calculate total sales resulting from the video, you can get a cost-per-sale. Cost-per-sale can be hard to calculate. Cost-per-second is easily calculated, but does not tell you the true effectiveness of the campaign in terms of sales.
My favorite viral video of all time that is also a commercial is the “Will it Blend” series. They built their own website just for this campaign and created several videos, posting them on YouTube.com and other places. The whole campaign was a direct response to the negative advertising from their competitor or fans of the competitor. Here’s the back-story as I understand it. Vitamix makes premium blenders for home and commercial use. Vitamix blenders are awesome products and have their own strengths and weaknesses. Blentec is the direct competitor for Vitamix. They make premium home blenders and commercial versions as well. Blendtec advertises their advantages over Vitamix. Vitamix advertises their advantages over Blendtec. In the “buzz”, Blendtec was accused of having problems with motors overheating and whatever else. The “Will it Blend” videos were a direct video assault on that accusation by creating fun videos of Blendtec blenders accomplishing ridiculous tasks by grinding up some difficult and unusual items. The element that caused this videos to go viral was 100% about the items they blended. The result was millions of people became huge fans of the Blendtec blenders. I must confess that these videos were key to helping me decide which blender I preferred. Although I have not yet purchased one of them yet. Hopefully Blendtec will read this article and send me a free blender. And Christmas is right around the corner! Check out the website: http://www.willitblend.com
The first step to creating a viral video is to create the most amazing entertainment video. You could theme it towards the product as long as you can do it without wrecking the entertainment value. You could create contests with various video designers. You could go to the local film schools and create a project through them. You could hire the best video production team in town and get them to help. You may be able to do something with a cheap camera and good idea. Look at how successful The Blair Witch movie was and it was not a big budget production video. Just make sure it is good enough that people will explode with excitement about it. That’s harder than it sounds. But without the excitement, the video won’t go viral.
The second step is to really figure out how to fit product placement and branding into the video. One of the funniest product placement videos is the Diet Coke and Mentos videos. That video wasn’t sponsored by Diet Coke or Mentos. It was an accidental commercial. The video went viral in a major way and if I heard the rumor correctly, Mentos contacted the author of the video and worked out some free Mentos and maybe some other benefits. Take a look at that video and notice how it would make people buy Mentos and try this at home. This video has over 10,000,000 views on YouTube.com and many millions more through TV coverage, spin-offs, etc.
The bottom line is that if you want to create a viral video, you must create a contagiously entertaining video. It must be well done, have perfect comedic timing, great music, and be very careful with branding and marketing. You will probably spend more money on it than you would like. Then it may never become viral when you launch it. Not every good song is a hit. Not every hit is a good song. There is an art that goes right along with the silence.
You could purchase some advertising on various social networks and search engines to help drive traffic to your video to help get it started. There are many ways to help promote it. If you market the video, you increase the likelihood of it spreading. Write some excited articles about the video and place those on free article sites. All these can help get it started. But no matter what, the video has to be able to explode on its own merits in the end.
