This video is blowing up on YouTube right now, in which an actress does a great job lampooning the way in which black women have been portrayed by fast food chains, particularly McDonald's. While I want to believe this is just one woman creating a nice resume piece that will likely land her more roles, something makes me cautious that it was that innocent. That something is the Big Mac featured in the final third of the four minute and twenty second video. It's perfect. It looks styled. And we've all seen the "what they advertise, what you get" photographs. I did one years ago for Wendy's Baconator. Besides the perfection of her meal, she makes an excellent pitch for a Big Mac and vanilla shake. Watching her eat it, you want your own.
And 4:20 seems a little too perfect as well, now that I think about it.
The Onion - Not Trying to Be Viral - Just Doing It
Consistently better comedy than you'll find on TV - and now it's coming to TV January 21st on IFC, the Independent Film Channel. Hope that doesn't kill the mojo.
It's like Mad Magazine for adults, The Onion almost always does great humor, the kind you pass around to friends, making it....oh what's that word everyone wants to be...ah yes, VIRAL! But too many marketers don't understand that you can't just "make" a viral item, be it a video, cartoon, image or whatever. It has to have a reason to be viral, like humor or thought or intrigue. And all too often someone's idea of what should be viral is not the public's idea. If you try too hard you won't succeed. Remember that old phrase they tried to kick to the curb, "Content is King?" It's true.
There are agencies out there that will claim they can create viral buzz for your brand. Most of the time, they can get all their employees to tweet and blog about something they did for your brand, and they might bump you up the Digg rankings, but in the end a media push gets sniffed out and people don't fall for it. Here's a guy writing a column about how to create a viral buzz. The first commenter comes along and nails it: viral just happens, you don't create it. Yeah, that's what I said.
See below for a good example of what could be viral, at least for a two-day stretch in late November in the US.
I Can't Believe This Guy Is Beating Me by 59 Thousand
And with your help, he won't be much longer.
Tim Wilson. Never heard of him, but he's one of those country singers who throws in the F-word on his song and it's a success. "Ha-ha! He said, 'Where the Fuck is My Jetpack?'" and his song has over sixty-thousand views on YouTube.
By contrast, here is what I find to be a far superior song, and instead of just a picture of the smiling singer/songwriter you get an actual video, and this video is only sitting at about 1,200 views. (And between you and me, these lyrics are way better.)
Now granted, Mr. Wilson has a major label behind him and he tours regularly, whereas I write a small blog with a low readership and dabble in music from a computer in my bedroom, so I suppose it's only natural that the number of views for his song should surpass mine. Nevermind that he probably stole the line from me.
I would like to someday beat Tim Wilson on YouTube. Another person I'd like to beat is this dude, whose Kraftwerk/Devo/Cars sounding Jetpack video is just...well, you decide. He's got nearly 7K views.
What makes a successful video? I like to think it's content, creativity, a small push from a few people and maybe a bit of luck. With any luck and a small push from a few of you, I will beat Tim Wilson and Devo Dude in no time.
Then the world will buy the song and Tim's Nashville corporate lawyers will come calling, seeking copyright infringement money, to which I will reply, "Bite me. Owned the domain since 2003. Blogging under the name since 2006. Whereas your song was published in 2009. Who is infringing upon whom?" Or, "Upon whom is infringement being perpetrated?" Or, "This infringement you speak of, dear sirs, is wholly mine to claim! DON'T TREAD ON ME!" And then I will wave my snake-flag and call some local TV stations. Tell me, lawyers, do I have a case?
But it's not like the phrase is unique anymore anyway. Author and Roboticist Daniel Wilson (Another Wilson?) came to me years ago hoping to buy the domain for his book, which has the same title as this blog. I told him, "No. Why don't you register 'Where IS My Jetpack' instead?" Which he promptly did.
After the lawyers go away in sheepish defeat, (compensating me out-of-court for the pain, suffering and loss of potential wages) I will then maybe let Tim open for me at a show or two, provided he doesn't sing his Jetpack song.
Clicking allows maximization. Print on shitty paper for authenticity, then hang it on the bulletin board of the coffee-break area in your dying production studio.
I won't even give this video the benefit of an embedded view because the execution behind the attempt is so transparent. Not that the idea is so awful. Guy finds image of Burger King on his Big Mac bun. Cute.
It is introduced to me in an email that has all the markings of blog spam: "Hey, longtime fan of your blog and thought you might be interested in this. I keep seeing this video in a bunch of places and wondered what you thought. Funny stuff."
Whether or not BK is ultimately behind this doesn't even bother me. I doubt they are and this is probably someone's attempt to get some viral cred that they can put on their reel as they knock on doors to try to find a job. "We did this hilarious thing for BK that just blew up on YouTube!"
This one, like most of them, has the forced acting by amatuers who happened to have their cameras out as they were eating lunch at McDonald's. It is uploaded by a guy who, SURPRISE, has only ever uploaded one video - and it's this one. If my YouTube user name is jakeskatesf, I will likely have at least a few vids of myself skating, or doing bong hits, or hanging out at the beach, especially if I'm the kind of guy whose camera is so a part of me that I have it out while at lunch with my friends. And the people who think Jake's video is awesome, their profiles have ZERO uploads. These are what's known in the business as "fake plants pretending to like your faked stupid video." One of them comments on Jake's video that "Damn dude! This BK thing is blowin' up!" Uh, not really.
Good viral happens, it isn't seeded or trying to be "authentic." You can't PR your way to success through fake email accounts with "check this funny thing out I found" messages. And what really ticks most of us off are the lengths you will go to to make it seem as though you are just some Joe or Jake who made a video, creating fake profiles and seeding comments. At least have another couple videos on your channel to hide the fact that you created the channel for the sole purpose of promoting your little stunt that you hope gets noticed by CP+B.
Or just be honest and put it on your real channel with the explanation, "I need a job and so I did this thing to get noticed by someone." That would be far more digestible than what you're up to now.
I'm a big fan of stop motion animation, but it can get old after awhile. I clicked "play" on this video expecting to bail out (like I usually do) after a few seconds. But the simplicity of the concept combined with the infectious sound of Choo Choo La Rouge's "Here Come the Guns" (the guitar-work has a definite Boston sound) made me watch it all the way through. I know I'm not the only one who looks at the total time on a YouTube video and makes an instant judgment based on the length. Thirty seconds to a minute? Sure, I'll watch. Over two minutes? Better be good. Over five minutes? Not watching.
Which reminds me of the trend of late where agencies throw crap up on YouTube and label it an "ad" or a "commercial" when it is really a long, self-indulgent "film" that could only air on YouTube. That's not an ad. That's a naked attempt to be "viral", which, as we all know, works best when it happens by accident. But you go on and listen to your social media consultant/guru who claims he can create a viral video for you that will be seen by millions. When you ask him how he thinks this will affect sales, listen carefully as he explains that it's not about sales, it's about "brand awareness." Everyone's going to be talking about your fake surfing video in the city river, then when they need a wetsuit or a surf-board, your name will be "top of mind."
I get Linked-In updates about former colleagues who now include "social media" in their list of "core competencies." Most of these people were highly incompetent to begin with, now they're going to charge you to set up a Twitter account and show you how to "follow" people. "Look! Now you're following him! Once he follows you back, you can start to engage him in a conversation!" Chris Houchens also has a nice take on how everyone is now a social media expert.
With me playing into their hands, but only because unlike most "viral" efforts, this one is actually good. Ostensibly, this is to promote Samsung's new line of LED TVs. The YouTube user named "BaaaStuds" joined only last week and tells you to visit samsung.com/LED, which does not exist.
As one commenter says on YouTube, "Only in Wales," which is likely a polite English way of accusing Welshmen of sheep-shagging.
Just as "Rudolph" and "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" and "A Charlie Brown Christmas" get airplay every year, you should also put this video on your seasonal Holiday Watch List. (Charlie Brown is depressing. That boy needs medication. Or at least hit his dad's liquor cabinet.) This holiday classic is from a few years ago, but like all the great holiday films, it still sets the tone for a wonderful yuletide.
This is pretty funny stuff, featuring the perfect comic timing of Andre Agassi's ex-wife and Tom Cruise nemesis Brooke Shields, though it's quite a long way to go to tell the story of a minivan.
And "Routan"? That is almost as bad as "Touareg," which I've never known how to pronounce. Seems the volks at VW would be adept at naming celebrity babies.
The ad model of "two guys go off on a cross-country road trip to promote some product" should be nearing its demise, certain innovative ad agencies excluded. We've seen cereals, beers, Weber grills and other assorted items hawked in this sometimes-funny, usually-stupid fashion. It probably all started decades ago with the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile, but after the Alka-Seltzer sponsored "Speedy's Road Trip" concludes in Maine later this month, I'm pretty sure no one will have executed this idea quite as well as Rhett and Link, a couple of clowns from North Carolina, who began their tour in San Diego on Cinco de Mayo. Engineers by training, the pair abandoned corporate life for the lure of You Tube fame, because "they realized that sitting in front of a computer all day was going to kill them."
Through a series of songs, skits and ironically raised eyebrows, the two childhood friends document their journey through uploaded videos to Alka Selter's pretty nice microsite devoted to the journey. This one, done in Boston, is a nice spoof on the hideousness of locally produced TV spots. After only three days, it's been seen over 35K times on YouTube. You can't expect much more from a short-lived viral effort.
Another pretty good one here they did in DC oddly has half as many views as the previous after nearly a month.
Or maybe your humor is just not as juvenile as mine and about two million other fans of this stuff. If I'm late to this, I blame a coworker who sent it around the office today.
I love weird ideas. This one had to have been hatched spontaneously when some drunk guy was rambling to his buddies about history.
The concept: get people drunk and have them tell you what they know about history, then have the scenes being told acted out hilariously by the moderately famous and the pretty famous. This is the fourth installment from Drunk History, a YouTube creation of Derek Waters. This one has around 55K views after only a week. The first one (uploaded last Christmas) has been viewed nearly 1.7 million times.
Mike's Hard Lemonade is on your side, slackers looking to ditch work.
Nick Moy of Rasianen Creative sent me this "victim video" for Mike's Hard Lemonade, featuring Nick. You can, of course, make your own. Simply forward to your friends at work, who will tell your boss, "Wow! Poor [insert your name here] Look what we found! Guess s/he won't be coming in for a couple of days."
The next improvement in this sort of technology needs to be having the newscaster actually speak your name.
DISCLAIMER: I hate Ryan Seacrest. I hate Simon Cowell. I hate Paula Abdul. I hate American Idol and all that it stands for. But this is Gold.
Screw Weezer and their stupid, forgettable homage to all the recent virals. This thing, featuring Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black and Ben Stiller is far more viral, shareable and funnier than any contrived piece of crap by a washed-up 90s band.
To appreciate the true genius of this work, see here the original video from 1973, from which this thing was created.
Those who visit Where's My Jetpack? with any frequency know that I love politics. It is drama in real time, changing from day to day, and on any given day, crazy things can happen. It's an unpredictable soap-opera. I also love politics because it's about branding, public relations and advertising on an accelerated and ever-changing schedule. It's impromptu theater in-the-round, and in this election year, some amazing and astonishing things are happening.
Before I go on, I will divulge that I have never voted for a winner in a presidential election, which made me a loser when it came to Clinton I as well as Bush II. I always end up on the disappointed side of the electorate. I am a registered voter, but I am registered Independent, which means I don't get to vote in my state's primary. I am a bystander when it matters - when we are selecting those who will contend in our national election.
That said, there is a brand emerging in American politics the likes of which has never been seen. Chalk it up to a Connected Age, where a person can create a video and have it seen by millions in a matter of days (if it's good enough), or where a speech can be broadcast worldwide with the click of a mouse. Or maybe we can write it off to good speech-writing , where the finely tuned pen of a young wordsmith can put words into the mouth of a politician and cause a nation to dream.
Imagine a young, upstart new cola, challenging Pepsi and Coke for a majority of market share, and you have the candidacy of Barack Obama. Imagine Obama Cola suddenly replacing Coke and Pepsi on the convenience store shelves. Imagine consumers creating Obama Cola videos that suddenly went viral and made the Diet Coke + Mentos video look like a bad and forgettable episode of The Sarah Conner Chronicles. Imagine sales of Coke and Pepsi falling. People would be plenty pissed. Especially the makers of Pepsi and Coke.
Those who visit Where's My Jetpack? with any frequency know that I love America. I make fun of her, of course. She's an easy target. But stink though she does, she's the best thing afloat. I do not, however, confuse my flag with my God, (apologies to my many atheist readers) and my star-spangled banner never died for me. I don't think we rule the world, and I don't think this land is somehow magically destined to keep the universe safe for democracy. Politics and religion don't belong together, and anyone who brings their God into politics had best be watched closely.
But not since I was a regular attendee at a Black Pentecostal church in Springfield, Missouri have I been so inspired by the orations of a preacher. Or rather, a politician. Obama does not out-and-out invoke God in his speeches, in fact, he keeps God pretty separate. But he has injected something spiritual into American politics, and I hope it can't be stopped. It certainly can't be duplicated, and anyone who tries (and they all have) only ends up looking like a late-to-the-game pretender. I suppose it really isn't all about speech writing. because if you put any of Obama's speeches in front of any other candidate, they would ring false - and fall flat.
I don't know if I'd vote for the man if he in fact does win the nomination of his party, but his brand is something to behold. I likely disagree with him politically more than I agree with him, but I can't help being stopped in my tracks when he's got the mic.
The video below, with uncountable viewings in only four days, sums up what I'm trying to say quite nicely. You can't watch this video and not be moved, regardless of your political persuasion. It was created from a speech delivered only one month ago.
While I would of course welcome the comments of my fellow Americans on this subject, I'd be most interested in the views of my Aussie, Canadian, English, European, African, Indian and Asian readers on what is happening in this country. What do you folks make of what's going on over here? Or does it even matter?
Thanks to Catch Up Lady for alerting me to this video.
Before video links passed between friends and coworkers were known as "viral," and before people started trying to "monetize" those videos, we just passed stuff around (if we had the bandwidth) and watched them and laughed. (Agency Spy makes a great point: No one "creates viral videos." They either go viral or they don't. Most of the ones attempting to "be viral" simply disappear. I think I hear the sweet sound of a bursting bubble.)
Here's something that's seven years old, but still has that WTF quality that makes it worth seeing again. From London based Mother, where I want to work. (From Florida, of course, telecommuting. I will be happy to make monthly trips to London for meetings and pints.)
Anytime you put a 70s macho guy in polyester and play cheesy music behind him, then have him do something unexpected, it's comedy to me.
And why is this video still viral (resurrected every Christmas by various ad bloggers) seven years after it was produced?
It never tried to be viral.
It's not selling anything other than the agency behind it.
It's original.
It's funny.
It wasn't created by a "new media agency" who tried to flood the world with it.
An old lady gets kicked in the head by a guy who fell out of the fireplace and wears his jacket like a cape. Find a client who will let you do that.
I've generally scoffed at attempts by agencies to create work on behalf of clients that they hoped would "go viral" - usually because I find the attempts weak and not worth forwarding to my friends or colleagues. I don't want to be thought of as the idiot who thought your lame "viral video" was worthy of wasting someone else's time on.
I'm going to change my tune this time and promote the viewing of Tribal DDB's mockumentary for the Philips' Bodygroom. It's well done, if you like comedy with lots of deleted swearing. The main actor, who reminisces about his old buddy from Coney Island, Frank "Furback" Sack, was a great find and carries the piece by himself. My only criticism is the extra cheese the host throws on. He's sort of the poor man's Bruce Campbell, who has perfected Smarm Charm™ for Old Spice. (Of course I think all these guys steal from Bill Murray.)
This is the kind of stuff I wish I could work on. A client willing to give a project like this the go ahead is a pretty cool client. But will it sell Bodygrooms? That'll be hard to measure - and that's why the industry is in the crazy state it's in. I suppose if this thing gets a million views this month and Philips sees a simultaneous spike in Bodygroom sales, they can assume Tribal DDB talked a bunch of guys into manscaping.
Back in April, Angela at AdRants posted about the new campaign within a campaign for Priceline. William Shatner, in his recurring role as the Priceline Negotiator, gets himself a falcon sidekick called the Falcon of Truth. Shatty also sports an eyepatch, because as The Shat explains, "Tiniest fib, goes right for the eye." He proceeds to get a rental car from a desk clerk, who doesn't get her eye gouged out, which we assume means she actually did get His Shatness the best deal on a rental car.
So that was April. Priceline also offered the first 100 people who signed up a free Falcon of Truth t-shirt. Since I can never have enough free grungy yardwear with weird imagery on it, and since I'm a steadfast believer in the Power of The Shat to sell stuff, I signed up.
This morning (two and a half months later) a FedEx truck rolls up to my door delivering my Falcon of Truth t-shirt. I had totally forgotten the thing - not to mention the campaign. Two and half months is a lifetime when you're trying to create buzz for something.
So you launch this campaign in mid April, run about one spot a couple of times, throw up a companion website complete with the obligatory wallpapers, screensavers, giant downloadable images of Fat Shat in all his rotund and ridiculous glory, MP3s and even ringtones, and then you abandon it? (Yes, falcon ringtones.)
But wait, there's more! They even gave us B-roll footage and "the making of the Negotiator spots" behind the scenes action!
You had a good thing going here and then you let it die, Priceline. A few people tried to get the ball rolling, but it never took off like it should have. The notion of a falcon who detects lies and gouges out eyes has great comic possibilities. I see David Spade as a smarmy ticket agent rolling on the floor in agony after the Falcon has at him. As it is, if I ever wear this t-shirt, I'll have to go into a long explanation of just who the Falcon of Truth was.
"Way back in April of '07, Priceline tried to do a viral thing that never took off. See, Falcon of Truth was the sidekick to the Priceline Negotiator and if the falcon detected a lie, he'd....nevermind. It's just a t-shirt."
I'm new to this - although its apparently 16 days old - which is a lifetime in the viralsphere . (Yeah, I said it - Viralsphere™.) Try not to laugh (No way you can't laugh) - then ask yourself, "How'd Will Ferrell get away with this?" Move over, More Cowbell skit, this is Ferrell's best work in a while. Read the Wired story on it here.
Back when we were kids, the advertising people told us that "in the future" we'd all be free from disease and living in peace, flying around with our own jetpacks. The future is now...and we're still waiting.
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