How to make a viral video
Viral videos. What a great marketing tool they are for any company. When successful, they deliver staggeringly large audience at a fraction of a cost of a traditional marketing campaign. They are also effective because viral has the built-in “street cred” that only a word-of-mouth campaign can generate. It’s a marketer’s dream and the holy grail of internet advertising. The phrase has been overused to the point that it’s now a cliche for pretty much any video that aims at distribution via social media platforms, whether it’s successful or not.
Everyone tries, but very very few videos succeed at being viral. This is especially true with the videos that try to sell you crap – an activity pretty much universally disliked and about as far from viral model as you can get.
So, how do you make an effective viral video that actually sells a product or service rather than being comedy for it’s own sake, a category most successful viral videos fall in? It’s a highly elusive target with no formula. One thing is for sure – viral videos don’t come out of your average marketing meeting. They are unique, unusual, funny, unexpected. They look at at idea in a new light. They are original. These are all qualities far removed from the typical “bullet point” headlines of features and benefits a product or service offers – the usual tactic of trying to sell you something you don’t care about. Our _______ is the best because it’ll do XYZ for you and the price is great and other people like it and please please buy now. Pretty please? That’s the approach of most commercials, admittedly some done more creatively than others, but still the same lame sales technique people automatically dislike and tune out.
To make people want to forward your video to friends they have to just really like it. Sound simple, but pretty much impossible to engineer in a course of a traditional marketing campaign. Great ideas come from the least expected places. And the harder you try for it, the less likely you are to come up with something great. There is certain effortlessness and Zen-like feel around great ideas that art more than science and just can’t be forced.
So the closest I can come to shedding more light on the subject is to offer a case study – a story of a successful viral video we just produced here at DHD. I claim it a viral success because the video generated 10,000 hits in one day on Youtube. You might differ in your definition of viral, but that’s a l0t of eyeballs in a short time. We hope it continues to build on its momentum – and these videos usually do as they get mentioned in various blogs and sites and the momentum just keeps on building.
I think the success of this video is especially notable because it sells something that’s not something considered an “easy sell” in our highly skeptical world. Our client, Bigspot.com, is a highly successful, reputable company that pays consumers to take opinion surveys for various companies and products. I know most people are thinking “yea, right” at this point, because it sounds like one of those too-good-to-be-true internet scrams. Yet it’s really as simple as that and it works. The company is highly successful and while nobody is getting rich taking surveys on the internet, the money part is real and the model work very well. Still, you have to admit, it’s a slightly tough sell in our highly suspicious world, especially since there are lots of empty promises and scams out there that created the skepticism in the first place. So, how do you sell something like that? And make it viral?
We took a very simple approach, which is likely one of the reasons for the success of the campaign. We created an “commercial” for a fictitious product so bad, so incredibly stupid, so ridiculous – The Neck Basket – that just about anyone could appreciate the idiocy of the idea and laugh at it. Then we stopped the commercial in mid-stream with the stereotypical (yet always so very effective) needle scratch sound effect and then put in the pitch for our client – if you think this is bad, well, there’s something you can do about it at bigspot.com while getting paid for it. However, that spot did not end up being the viral video success I am talking about here, even though it’s still an effective, great commercial in its own right. What became the viral hit was the full-length spot for the “Neck Basket” we produced pretty much just for fun. It’s a minute and a half of ridiculous sales pitch for a non-existent product. Pretty much just a joke.
That was probably one of of the reasons for it’s success – the spot aimed to entertain and did not try to sell you anything. Yet it does sell bigspot.com very well because you learn about it from reading more about the video in the description and going to the “fake” Neck Basket website we created as well. No guarantees that people will continue to bigspot.com, but what a great way to bring the company into consumer’s consciousness – unobtrusively, non-pushy, all opt-in and and driven by people’s curiosity.
We didn’t plan for the full-lenght spot to sell anything and that’s probably exactly why it went viral and why it works. Instead of pitching it entertains, engages, and creates conversation. That’s the kind of stuff that goes viral. That’s what stands a chance of working within the social media ecosystem.
We can’t promise you that we will replicate the success of bigspot.com for you at Denver HighDef, but I can promise we will approach your product or service with the same open mind, originality, and out-of-the-box-thinking that became our recipe for success and standard operating procedure we aim for in all of our work here every time. We go to atypical lengths to come up with new and interesting ways to tell the story for even the smallest client or budget and create videos people actually like. Videos that we like ourselves and that we enjoy working on. We feel it’s the only way to stand out in the highly crowded world of often well-produced, flashy, yet pointless videos, WordPress templates and most other cliche-laden, cookie-cutter world of old and beaten to death marketing pitches out there today. We approach each project as a unique creative challenge and we feel that’s the only chance at success there is in today’s new mediascape. Well, OK, you might be successful even with a lame idea if you have a million dollars for your media buy… but for the rest of us I think success is still defined by doing great work.
