The Key Ingredients of the Best Digital Campaigns of 2012

How to make your videos as shareable as possible for ad agency new business.

I had the opportunity to meet the video team for McDougall Interactive Marketing in Boston. They excel in creating viral videos. Their work has been seen on MTV, G4, and Comedy Central. One of their recent creations, a comedy video, “Cat-Friend vs. Dog-Friend” was featured on the Today Show and has been viewed by over 6 million people in only a few short weeks.

Wikipedia’s definition of a viral video is a video that becomes popular through the process of Internet sharing, typically through video sharing websites, social media and email. On July 14, 2010, Old Spice launched the fastest growing online viral video campaign ever, garnering 6.7 million views after 24 hours, ballooning over 23 million views after 36 hours. Old Spice’s agency created a bathroom set in Portland, OR and had their TV commercial star, Isaiah Mustafa, reply to 186 online comments and questions from websites like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Digg, YouTube and others. The campaign ran for 3 days.

Youtube has created its own statistics page. Read through this list and you will understand why video is such a great marketing tool: 

• Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
• 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
• 500 years of YouTube video are watched every day on Facebook, and over 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter each minute
• 100 million people take a social action on YouTube (likes, shares, comments, etc) every week
• YouTube is localized in 43 countries and across 60 languages
• 243% The amount video increases the time spent on a webpage
• The number of daily mobile views averages 100 million
• Over 50 times likelihood of a video to rank on page 1 of Google over text
• 59% of senior executives prefer to watch video instead of reading text
• By 2013 over 90% of internet traffic will be video based
• Visitors who view product videos are 85% more likely to buy than visitors who do not
• YouTube is available on 350 million devices

Techniques derived from new technology can help advertisers create videos that large numbers of viewers are inclined to share.

In the following presentation, The Best Digital Campaigns of 2012, French marketer, Gregory Pouy, sites a study conducted by the Harvard Business School. It identifies the elements that keep people watching a video or what causes them to lose interest. The study also provides some insight as to what type of ad tends to go viral and what type of individual shares them.

photo credit: kino-eye via photopin cc