“We decided to make a viral video…” #WTFpeople
I’m always amazed/shocked/embarrassed when I hear someone say that they “decided to make a viral video”. In fact, I heard a very experienced CMO of one of the biggest companies in the world say this just last week. It went something like, “We knew the launch of this product was going to be very important for the company, so we decided we needed to make a viral video.”
At what point does someone create a video and not want it to “go viral”? You might as well say, “We sat down and decided since this was such an important campaign, that we should create something that actually gets results.” Novel concept.
Compelling video is still the single most important way to achieve massive reach. When people talk about the Old Spice campaign and how amazing it was from a social activation/extension standpoint, I have to point out that because the videos (in this case the TV commercials) were so funny and memorable, it naturally became a social media success. Yes, the Twitter to Youtube effort was awesome, but again, that only became part of the strategy after people cared about seeing more of Mustafa.
Case in point, at a conference earlier this year I heard from an executive that leads the agency that created one of the most viral videos of 2010, the Evian Skating Babies video, and he said that the night before they launched this there was panic at the agency because they weren’t sure people were going to think it was a funny video. Then it went and got 39 million views.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t strive for a video to go viral. Of course you should. But to me it sounds rather absurd to say, “ok guys, we need to create one of them viral videos”.
Ugh. This is why many people fail to understand how to create such things. Take the focus off the “viral” – like you said, it goes without saying. Instead just simply focus on an endeavor to create/capture something insanely cool, funny, entertaining, touching, innovative, edgy, uncomfortable, shocking… emotionally gripping for whatever reason. It’s really the basis of most all art, isn’t it? To really hit hard, sometimes you have to be willing to push a concept pretty far out there to capture attention and make sparks fly – which can be risky – but then how many great and memorable examples of advertising (or art, for that matter) can you recall that were safely well within the lines of mediocrity? Which, by the way, is exactly why companies should seek to hire brilliant creatives who know how (intuitively and from experience) to walk the fine line of totally awesome and total disaster.
Make this fantastic thing you’ve created easily accessible and shareable (push it out there, even) and hope for the best. ;)