Some recent marketing campaigns have taken their “viral” aspect to its extreme and are not even mentioning a product or brand name, but are instead running a dark campaign. The only aim this can have is to encourage the curiousity of the audience that finds something oddly unreal about the video and starts investigating who could be behind it. Such an approach usually engages younger audiences who dislike overt marketing and gets people talking – ultimately also talking about the brand.

Let me explain what I mean by “dark viral marketing” with three recent examples, one of which is Australian.

1. Taylor Momsen escapes paparazzi

Several lists of top viral or popular videos have been published. We now look at the top video ads of all time, the top ones of 2008, and the top spenders of 2008. I have extracted all the key stats as of today from YouTube.

The following ads are the top 5 of all time (according to the “Great Advertising, Clever Ads” blog).

What I noticed while collecting the stats was that while I only point out the top performing copy of the commercial, there are often many copies. Most of these copies pale in view count against the main copy, however sometimes (as is the case for the Levis 2007 collection ad) the copies can also achieve hundreds of thousands of views. So, an aggregate view count would be a lot more representative for the popularity of the commercials than the view count of the highest achiever.

Also I noticed that going beyond the top 5 makes it really muddy, since many commercials have around 6M views.

Please note that movie trailers and game trailers have been kep out of this ranking – e.g. “Quantum of Solace” achieved about 8M views across the top 8 copies of the trailer, though every single copy didn’t achieve more than 2.1M. Music videos are also outside the ranking since they play in a different league with the popular ones having far above 30M views.

The following ads are the top 10 commercials of 2008 on YouTube:

Please note: The last two are not really countable because they have built on an existing viral video meme and thus were removed from the count. Interestingly, the Visa ad that was a lot less subtle in the advertising message also received a lot less views than the Stide Gum, which is rather a sponsorship than an ad.

It is interesting to see that these ads have achieved quite a following in the short time that some of them have been around. Given a few years to catch up, the Gorilla ad, the Guitar Hero ad, or even the OLPC ad may well end up amongst the most popular ever.

The next lot of well performing commercials after these are in the 250K-500K range and are mostly Superbowl ads (e.g. Career Builder, Diet Pepsi Max, Bud Light Fire, Fedex Carrier Pidgeons, Audi R8 Godfather, Pepsi Justin Timberlake Fly, Bud Light Fly, Bud Light Cheese), just like many of the most popular ads are also superbowl ads (e.g. E*Trade Baby, Bridgestone Scream, Bud Light Will Ferrell, Careerbuilder Heart). There are also a few really badly performing superbowl ads, so advertising at superbowl is not sufficient for creating a popular ad. However, the superbowl certainly helps to reach a large number of viewers for those ads that are entertaining in the first place (this top 10 superbowl ads video summary achieved 1,167,754 views by itself).

Looking at the ads that Nielsen touted as the best-liked TV commercials of 2008, one has to wonder if most of Nielsen’s panel consists of children or caring parents, since they are mostly the cute ones with animals in them or other family-related stories. Checking back with the view numbers on YouTube for these videos, there is no overlap with the most viewed videos other than the Budweiser fire ad. The top popular ad according to Nielsen is the NFL story of Chester Pitts which only achieved a view count of 76,442.

So, in comparison to the top performing commercials, the big question is: what numbers make a commercial popualar and therefore a viral success?

Feed Company undertook a survey amongst agencies to find out what their expectations were for a viral campaign. Twenty-eight percent of respondents considered 1 million views successful; around 22 percent each would settle for 500,000, 250,000 or 100,000 views.

What does this all tell us?

The successful ones are easy to judge. If e.g. a video achieves more than 500K views in a short time, say 6 months, it can definitely be considered viral. This is for an ad that has basically a world-wide audience. According to the superbowl results, ads that achieve more than250K views within a year should still be considered viral successes.

In the 100K area, it becomes more complicated. Depending on the time frame, the size of the target audience, the language of the ad, the impact in sales created, and possibly other factors, such a view count can still be considered a viral success.

Lesson learnt: It is important to create an expectation for what is considered a success in terms of view count and in other metrics before starting a campaign, such as to be able to judge the success afterwards.

On 14th November, a video explaining the decision is published as the main channel video, together with 20 3-minute clips from their productions and 3 documentary style videos. The channel page is nicely designed with typical Monty Python imagery and has a simple link to their “Daily Monty Python” website. The explanatory video encourages people to watch and distribute the free clips, while at the same time pointing out the intention to sell more DVDs of the full videos from the Monty Python store. Each of the 20 production clips has a URL to the full DVD on Amazon in their description. No fancy overlay-ads are used.

Barely a week after the publication of the clips, NewTeeVee reports success of the strategy: apparently a 16,280% increase in sales of DVDs in Amazon!

People like the organised YouTube channel to get a quick, pre-sales overview of their works and entice a new generation to content that hasn’t had any new releases since 1983. They like the easy of linking to a site where they can get more information and buy the full DVDs, who come with extra material and therefore extra incentives to purchase. The secret of the YouTube channel is to use it as a pre-sales marketing instrument – as a way of viral advertising by using extracts of original content.

At the same time, Monty Python has refrained from upsetting their biggest fans and not issued take-down notices on clips that were published on other channels on YouTube. Our suggestion would be to use fan clips for further advertising. It seems a sensible move, since MontyPython’s own clips are by far not a complete set (yet?), and since the fan clips are often of as good a quality and have view counts in the millions that the newly uploaded Monty Python clips haven’t quite achieved yet.Therefore, if somebody searches for a particular Monty Python clip, they will most often land on a fan-uploaded clip. Why not make use of the already existing virality to further drive DVD sales?

Monty Python also has a square focus on YouTube in this activity. Checking MySpace.tv and Dailymotion, there doesn’t seem to be a similar channel there. This is another oppportunity missed for diversifying the activity and gaining a broader audience. In Europe, for example, Dailymotion’s take up is larger than YouTube’s. And a different kind of audience hangs out on MySpace to YouTube.

Overall, this is an example of a well executed and successful viral video advertising campaign. It shows respect for the fans, it provides the right teasers, and it provides subtle links to where to buy the full content.

He goes on for another 45min to explain what kind of videos you can find on YouTube and what impact that has on society and the individuals being active on YouTube.

He summarises the history of YouTube around including Lonelygirl15, faking thumbnails, mashups and their legal implications, and political and personal statements in video.

Overall a really interesting video by an anthropologist to help us understand the YouTube phenomenon.