Client: “We’d like to make a Viral Video please”
Would you? I’ve lost count of the number of times over the last few years that a company has phoned us and proudly asked if we could help them to create a viral video for their brand.
We research their product, we research their audience, we brainstorm ideas, we argue, we laugh, we refine and narrow down our ideas into 3 or 4 routes that will work. 3 or 4 ways of producing something that the target audience will love and will be sure to share online and spread like wildfire to the masses.
The problem comes when the client then realises that the ideas go too far. “We can’t show our boss this, he’ll never go for it!” “Our brand can’t be associated with that! Far too risky! Can we tone it down?” …Oh, so you didn’t want a viral, you wanted an ad, is that right? “No, we want a viral, we want it to go massive!”
So we brainstorm again, we argue about how ‘viral’ something is, we laugh, we refine and narrow it down to a couple of further ideas, which could still be good enough, still funny enough to at least make an impact within their industry if nothing else.
“These are great! We’ll show it to our boss and let you know if we get the go ahead”. Great news, or so we think. But the boss has other ideas. “There’s not enough of the product in there, can we add in a packshot at the end?” “Can we add a voiceover explaining the benefits of the product?” “Can we put bullet points at the start and end to highlight the key features?”
You want an ad.
This happens a lot, and of course, we can make ads, we make great ads, but a great ad does not a viral make.
So, if you are a brand, looking for a company to make a viral video, ask yourself if you really are prepared to go the whole way and really make a viral. Ask yourself if you can go out on a limb to produce something really funny, or clever, or disruptive, or preferably all three. Viral isn’t right for every brand, but it’s certainly true that a well made viral rarely harms a brand image as much as nervous brand managers think it might.
If your aim is to show your customers what your product can do, how it can help them, whilst clearly showing the product, covering all the features and benefits, and finally have to demonstrate to your superiors how each feature is clearly shown to the viewer throughout.. then you want an ad.
If you want people to talk about your brand, and you want to minimise media spend by encouraging them to spread your message for free, then you need a viral.
Obviously, it’s not always black and white; there are indeed many shades of grey. Sometimes an ad becomes a viral, and sometimes a viral gets re-made into an ad, but shades of grey are not what makes things viral, it’s the black and white that gets shared.
Not so long ago web video was a small industry, where you needed a truckload of bandwidth to even think about watching a tiny, low-resolution clip of a cat falling off a skateboard or a kid riding his bike off a cliff. Along came youtube in 2005…yes, that’s right, just five years ago, and suddenly an explosion of web video was imminent.
Widespread broadband, and even wider-spread enthusiasm from a new generation of people who have never known a world without the internet, and you have a recipe for the death of TV. But all this online stuff is still just getting going. Among the fog of videos of cats, kids, puppies and *insert cute/clumsy/dangerous/fast/slow/big animal/human here* a new dawn of web video is peeping over the horizon.
Brands are now beginning to jump head first into the web video world, even going as far as making big-budget commercials that never actually make it to TV. Recent campaigns for Old Spice and Nike demonstrate that video on the web has grown up.
Agencies are also finally taking all this very seriously, with words like ‘digital’ and ‘social’ being mentioned earlier in the creative meetings than ‘tv spots’. The question that has been on everyone’s minds in agencies across the land is how long before web (or digital as it has now been labelled) sits atop the advertising tree.
Digital spend on advertising now exceeds television spend in most developed economies, with 23.5% of all advertising money in the UK spent on digital compared with just 21.9% on TV. This must lead to the inevitable conclusion that television will eventually die out as a form of entertainment as advertisers abandon it in favour of digital. This shift in money can only render TV broadcasters the penniless poor relation of Google, Facebook et al, and completely unable to spend money on actually producing the TV shows – you know, the bits between the adverts.
This may well turn out to be some sort of abstract doomsday scenario for the future of television, but major commercial TV broadcasters should be clamouring to push their digital credentials towards the big brands who currently still advertise on TV. Attracting major digital commercial deals with big brands must be the new aim, as it is these brands who will eventually find the concept of TV advertising clumsy and expensive compared to the relatively inexpensive, efficient and interactive world of youtube, Facebook and Twitter.
Maybe television in it’s current form will die out and be forced to merge with the internet somehow. It has certainly been a long-held prediction of many a forward thinker in this industry, but yet still television continues, and most of us still go home and switch on the TV in the evening.
What will be the tipping point that means we all throw our televisions in the trash and all gather round the computer instead? Which of the major players will be the first to launch a truly revolutionary device that completely replaces television altogether? The strange thing is that all of the likely candidates for developing such a product are all from different areas of the marketplace. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Samsung, Nokia… they all have the potential to takeover TV, but it somehow seems unlikely that it will be an actual TV broadcaster who takes the initiative.
Video Production Blog from Scorch London 