If you are a frequent visitor to YouTube, you must have come across short video clips. In fact, there are millions of short video clips on the web, produced both by professionals and amateurs. The amateurs publish their video clips for fun and notoriety, and the professionals produce and publish them in order to drive traffic to their web sites and sell their products or services. For them this is an effective means of marketing. Tens of millions of people watch these short videos, but how effective really are they at driving qualified traffic to web sites?
The process of driving customers to web sites is known as viral marketing. Viral marketing is now one of the most powerful ways to market online. This is what the Internet was designed for — multimedia as mainstream. This has come about primarily because of the adoption of broadband. According to a recent report, 50 per cent of the houses in the US have broadband, and that trend is continuing across the world. In fact, 80 to 90 per cent of businesses are now using broadband.
Viral advertising can quickly become effective if the videos are entertaining and provocative. The video will then be shared by tens and thousands of viewers, most of them connected through online social networks. Take for instance, Cadbury’s UK gorilla ad. This formed a major part of the pitch by Fallon London to secure the contract with Cadbury Schweppes in 2006. The proposal was to step away from pushing the product through traditional advertising means, and instead produce “entertainment pieces” which would appeal to a broader range of consumers and spread through viral marketing — that is, through word of mouth. To this end, Cadbury ended its 10-year sponsorship of the popular soap Coronation Street.
The commercial was uploaded to the video sharing website, YouTube. Shortly after it was first aired, it was viewed over 500,000 times in the first week alone!
According to data available in 2007, the video was viewed over six million times across a large number of video-sharing web hosts. About 70 Facebook groups appreciated the advertisement with one of these groups named, “We love
the Cadbury’s drumming gorilla.”
The effort did not stop at this. A number of spoofs and parodies were quickly uploaded by amateurs with the tacit approval of Cadbury, and the British branch of Wonderbra created and uploaded their own, Dan Cadan-directed version of the advertisement, replacing the gorilla with Wonderbra model (and musician) Jentina. The Cadbury punch line, “A glass and a half full of joy” was also replaced with “Two cups full of joy.”
Polling company YouGov reported that public perception of the brand had noticeably improved in the period following the launch, reversing the decline experienced in the first half of 2007. As Saumya Chattopadhyay, Head, Strategic Planning, Rediffusion (Y&R), points out, “It is important to understand the nature of the environment in which video clips are most widely distributed and shared. If you simply add a video clip to your site or blog, and to YouTube, you will be taking advantage of only a small fraction of the opportunity that exists.”
The main objective should therefore be to optimise the audience. This can be done through a process called Social Media Optimisation, or SMO.
SMO is the process by which you optimise your online presence to be more visible through searches within online communities and community web sites. The essence of SMO is to increase the chances of your video — or any other portable, sharable content — being distributed more widely and being found more quickly though community search engines.
This is important when producing short videos, because it is within and across these networked community sites that video clips are most likely to be distributed and shared.
In other words, to maximise the chances of your video going viral, you have to optimise it for sharing across social network communities. As Chattopadhyay explains, “You cannot deci-de that you are going to make a viral film. First and foremost, you have to make an engaging and interesting piece which has the potential of capturing people’s interests. Only then can such a film succeed. And here’s a tip — reduce the advertising message to the bare minimum, only then will people see it as entertainment and not an advertisement of a brand. And only then will it really become part of popular culture.”
The author is a well-known industry watcher