Leave Britney Alone!

You Tube has revolutionized viral marketing, it’s revolutionized marketing period and yet we see very few established marketeers venturing into this realm - sure I should be talking about that chocolate advert that’s gone all ‘superviral’ but that’s got a £6.4m ad spend and an actor who specializes in playing simians.

The key component in all these is humour and/or horror, the Jackass effect. Boardroom’s full of execs and creatives do not make for innovative virals, by their very nature those that seem too ‘contrived’, too ‘market spun’ die a lonely death online - sure entertain us, but don’t give us the star spangled brand crapola all over it. Back to the chocolate monkey - the viral that has nothing to do with chocolate and everything to do with entertaining - the winning formula is brand retention, I don’t even think about what a man in a monkey suit playing drums says about a Dairy Milk, I don’t care, I care about the sociability of the viral, I want to talk about it, it compels me.

You Tube has also revolutionized the marketing creative budget and I’d argue that savvy marketeers and digital agencies should be offering new business models to brands who are keen to innovate. How about you hire an agency to create a viral, or to find viral content, there’s a lot of it out there - they re-purpose it with your brand, something funny, something subtle a post-roll saying ‘brought you by…’ or better something funny to link the brand and viral content, show a little self-deprecation, show that you can laugh at yourself.

Seed it on every video sharing site you can, let it go. If it gets the views, the agency gets paid, use the Google Adsense model, the better the creative, the better the reward, let the agency adsorb the budget cost - it would certainly focus their creative energies.

The agency’s job is less about Fiji water and flipcharts and more about finding content already seeded on You Tube, getting in touch with the owner, re-purposing it with brand sponsorship and putting it back out there - discovering the right content is the skill and an agency demonstrating it’s creative mettle by being agile, able to adapt, monitor and react.

The big marketing agencies have an economic need to maintain traditional client/agency working models - but that doesn’t stop younger, more agile players offering a new way of doing things. We’ve never had so many content creators, so many disruptors and creatives - we should use them - channel their collective creativity to all parties mutual financial benefit.

Take this video, Leave Britney Alone, a the time of writing it’s been viewed 1,467, 794 and it was posted 1 day ago - I use it as an example because I’ve been sent the link 3 times this morning and don’t think I’ve ever mentioned a regard for Ms. Spears, beige bedsheets or hair dye to any of my friends. Why send me it? It’s weird, it’s topical, it’s counter to mainstream press, it’s Sub-Jackass. It’s viral.

Re-wind 1 day, we’ve been approached by a brand who sell hair clippers, they want to reach out to the web demographic, they want something viral, ‘like that Coke and Mentos stuff’. We find this video, it’s been watched 100 times, but it’s rocketing in popularity, we contact ‘itschriscrocker’ we ask him if we can add a little graphic at the end of the video saying, ‘ bald is beautiful’ with a link to X Brand hair clipper’s homesite, or better a link to Amazon and the X Brand page with consumer reviews. The new video replaces the old one, within a day 1.5 million people have seen it. The agency and Chris get paid per view based on an agreed per view rate with X brand hair clippers.

The brand only pays for reach and the whole campaign from inception to execution to measurable success has taken 1 day.

Posted in Viral Marketing | 2 Comments »