Videomeme

New Video Sharing Features

Check out the new 'Share this video' link at the bottom left of the player.

Motorola Wirebreakers Campaign

This is the latest viral video campaign, Wirebreakers, from Motorola to promote their new wireless stereo headphones, the MOTOROKR S9.

The videos show a fictional dance crew, The Wirebreakers, encouraging members of the public to join them in random dancing in public places like the golf course, above.

Bomchickawahwahs

Variously described as a prime example of Third Wave Feminism, the sexiest girl band on the planet and the worst commercial campaign ever, our favourite response to this piece is "+5 stars for an accurate rendition of the internal anatomy of the human cerebelum".

Hello Bloggers - Goodbye Cellulite

Nivea's campaign for it's new Goodbye Cellulite product is kinda interesting. It's online only - no TV, no print, no outdoor, no nothing - and centres around a blog that's soliciting feedback from people who've been sent product samples, and a bunch of videos.

(Disclosure: we're being paid by the marketing agency, DBM, who created the blog, to track the buzz around this campaign measure the online impact of the blog and the videos. Note: we have not been paid or even asked to write this post. To be totally clear, no one is being paid to blog about the product and that's one of the things that I like about the campaign: it's asking real people to give honest feedback and is simply trying to increase the visibility of that feedback).

 

Sending out product samples to people and encouraging them to blog about the results, both on their own blogs and on the DBM blog, is smart. If this product does what it promises, the results will be obvious and there'll be plenty of  people making genuine recommendations. Giving product samplers lightweight  tools to do that and surfacing the conversations is a great idea.

The video strategy, on the other hand, seems much less sure-footed. The one below is over two-and-a-half minutes long, which seems incredibly long-form. It's moderately shareable. You can get the embed code from the DBM blog, though not from the BoreMe page where it's been seeded, and not from the Nivea microsite.

The Nivea microsite makes me go absolutely bonkers. It opens in a pop-up window and suppresses the address bar. So if I want to send you a link to one of  the videos, there's nary a URL in sight. Not smart. Wouldn't be so bad if the inbuilt tell-a-friend feature was usable. It isn't. Dark colors, low contrast, input fields too small for the inputs, no indication as to what inputs are mandatory. I managed to fire off an email to a friend, but it took me two or three goes. The video's OK, but I'm not going to go through this much pain to send it on to someone.

UPDATE: I've updated this post to make it clear that although the DBM blog is about Nivea's Goodbye Cellulite product, Nivea are not writing, controlling, moderating or responding to any of the content on that blog.

 

 

Chart Widget

We've  just  launched a chart widget  so you can embed today's top 20 videos in the sidebar of your blog (see right) or in a post like this one (below).

It's dynamic, so there'll be fresh stuff in every day. Please tell us which blogging platforms support this...and which ones don't!!!

Source: Viral Video Chart

Not All Views Are Equal

From an interview with Scott Kirsner, of the newly opened up Variety.

Variety: What are the challenges of measuring the popularity of videos across multiple sites? Is a view on MySpace really the same thing as a view on Revver or YouTube?

VVC: No, different sites count a video as being viewed at different points in the viewing cycle, and of course some sites still don't publish view data at all. It's precisely because of the difficulty of verifying and normalising view data that we don't use view data as the basis for our video charts. We collect our own data, measuring the number of people embedding and linking to videos on their own blogs and personal websites. This buzz metric lets us publish a list of the most popular videos that's unaffected by definitional discrepancies, view-fraud or marketing expenditure.

Variety: Do you feel that most sites' data about the number of times a video is viewed is pretty reliable? 

VVC: No, absolutely not. With many video sites, you can simply open up the page with your video on it and set your browser to automatically refresh the page. This is a really simple way to inflate viewing figures, requiring almost no specialist knowledge.  We estimate that at least 200,000 videos a day are currently being uploaded to video sharing sites. Getting your video noticed amongst this ocean of content is hard. So the prize for getting your video onto the homepages or most viewed lists of MySpace or YouTube is huge, and the incentive to game these sites really strong.

To combat this, some video sites are beginning to use third parties to verify view figures, particularly in cases where a marketing agency has paid to have their video campaign placed and promoted on the site.

Variety: What about compiling an accurate number of views for a video that may be posted on multiple sites, by multiple people?

VVC: That's hard. We have tools to help us detect the same video on multiple sites (or on the same site, posted by different people) and we aggregate figures where this happens. Some of the video sites are working on audio and visual 'fingerprinting' but these techniques are being developed chiefly to detect copyright-infringing clips. They haven't yet been proven to work at Internet-scale and don't address some of the subtler issues of content identity that we're concerned with. From our point of view, a longer clip or a differently edited clip may be materially different content but fingerprinting techniques, which are based on sampling, are not designed to care about these issues, because they're not particularly salient to the enforcement of intellectual property rights.

Variety: It seems like we don't really know much about how much video content is being viewed on sites like  NBC.com or BBC.co.uk or ABC.com, do we? Those sites don't seem to present the number of views they deliver, for a show like "Lost," for example, as public information.... 

VVC: This is something we'd like to work on, but it will require greater co-operation from the sites themselves. We'd be delighted to talk to any large media outlet that delivers a significant number of video streams.

Variety: Are there other problems or barriers that still exist, in terms of measuring which video content people are watching?

VVC: Sure. There are other well-known deceptive practices designed to increase viewing figures. Many videos are misleadingly titled. And there's an increasing tendency to manipulate the thumbnail image produced for the video by briefly inserting an unrelated still image halfway into the video. Images of bare skin tend to work pretty well. And deceptive practices aside, legitimate, paid-for marketing activities are increasingly being used to drive traffic to commercially produced video content that's hosted on YouTube or MySpace. So it's incredibly difficult to get a real measure of what, in a grass roots, organic sense is truly popular just from viewing figures alone.

Top 10 Viral Adverts of 2006

Viral. Not as in edgy. Not as in produced by a hip viral agency. Just the most talked about ads of the year, as measured by blog buzz.

1. Wii / Wii For All | Leo Burnett | 3,392 links | 1,784,131 views

2. Dove / Evolution| Ogilvy & Mather | 3,186 links | 3,506,058 views

3. Sky One / Real Life Simpsons Intro | Devilfish | 3,010 links | 12,837,365 views

4. Coke / GTA | Weiden & Kennedy | 2,434 links | 1,527,773 views

5. M-Tel / Voicemail | Unknown | 863 links | 5,595,674 views

6. American Express / Wes Anderson | Ogilvy & Mather | 565 links | 304,540 views

7. Super Soaker / Oozinator | Unknown | 404 links | 770,829 views

8. PS3 / Baby | TBWA / Chiat / Day | 384 links | 291,002 views

9. The First Post / Web 2.0 | Leo Bridle / Leo Powell | 341 links | 635,941 views

10. Volkswagen / Un-pimp Your Ride | Crispin Porter & Bogusky | 339 links | 2,527,099 views

Dove's 'Evolution' Viral Ad is Bigger than the Superbowl

There's a great article in Ad Age claiming that Dove's fantastic stop-motion animation, depicting the warped beautification process by which a model is transmuted from flesh to pinup, has driven more traffic to their CampaignForRealBeauty site than the very successful Superbowl ad they aired in February this year.

The viral ad, titled 'Evolution', was number 7 in this week's Viral Video Chart. Now we don't publish a chart of viral adverts, but we have the data, and it would look like this. That's right. There are no less than six different versions of the Evolution viral in this week's commercial top 10.

Alexa's data, for what it's worth, backs up the Ad Age story nicely.

5 reasons to advertise on our site

#1. We have a fanatically loyal audience of video junkies, creatives, bloggers, marketeers, agency wonks, PR professionals and ad execs who say lovely things about us. Subscribers to our daily and weekly emails include people working at Edelman, Sony BMG, LA Times, Ogilvy, Revver, Diffiniti, MTV, Nokia, i-level, DDB, Unilever, The Telegraph, Mindshare, vMix, BBDO, BSkyB, Mediacom, Fairfax Digital,  Ellen TV, Warner Bros, TV Guide, BBC, Al Jazeera...these are smart, high-income, influential folks.

#2. We can get your campaign in front of 250,000 such unique users. (We serve 1 million impressions to 0.25m uniques a month).

#3. We syndicate our charts to several prominent mainstream media outlets, including TVGuide, The Guardian and thelondonpaper.

#4. We get a disproportionate amount of press and blog coverage. See our Buzz / Press section for links and quotes. This doesn't mean that your campaign will get covered, too, but it does increase the likelihood.

#5.  We can develop innovative and bespoke advertising units for you. We're seasoned ad industry people with a high grade development team behind us.

OK. If you're sold, call Scott on +44 (0)7974 328052 or email scott@unrulymedia.com.  If you're  not,  take a deep  breath and start at #1 again. Repeat until convinced.

Advertising Rate Card for Viral Seeding and Sponsored Content

Above-the-fold custom content unit on the right hand site of all chart pages (100 x 75 image and around 30 words or so of copy):

• 2 weeks: $2,000.00
• 4 weeks: $3,500.00

IAB standard ad units:

• 728x90 IMU @ $15.00 CPM
• 300x250 IMU @ $20.00 CPM

All these prices are gross and we offer a 25% discount on rebookings.

We're happy to discuss more tailored solutions as well.  Like what? You might want to plaster the site with branded wallpaper for a day. Or create a custom top 10, either using your own content, or using us to find you relevant videos that will create a buzz among bloggers and journalists. 

Phone Scott on +44 (0)7974 328 052 or email scott@unrulymedia.com to talk about setting up a campaign.