As ViralBlogger I get offered so many “wanna be” virals. Most of these virals are cheap rubbish and not hilarious, horrifying or horny at all. They lack any kind of WOW-effect or respect for consumers. CMO’s please take my free advice: rubbish virals will damage your brand! Put in passion, time and money into your viral strategy, concepting and production. Or don’t try to be viral at all and rather stick to your tv commercials!
But BMW’s latest attempt to get viral spread and buzz effect, in their launch the 1-series coupe in the US, has so much potential, that all CMO’s and agencies must see BMW’s engagement strategy. So buckle-up and let’s drive deeper into BMW’s Rampenfest viral.
The idea behind BMW’s viral campaign is simple but witty. Build a 454 meter-high ramp that will launch the BMW 135i over the European landscape and across the Atlantic onto US shores. Here the joke starts. Jeff Schultz, a (faux) documentary filmmaker, has produced a great movie trailer that will cover the entire event.
You can also visit Jeff Schultz’s weblog to read more. And if you’re 21, female and willing to upload a photo to be voted as Miss Ramp, you can enter with the rest of the contestants here.
The follow-up to the hugely successful Cadbury’s Gorilla advert, ‘Trucks‘ by Fallon’s director Juan Cabral and Blink Productions, has been released online. The commercial wil air later today on TV. The music in the much-anticipated sequal is Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now.
Viral Friday is the weekly viral video chart of ViralBlog, showing the 10 most popular viral videos, commercials or user-generated videos, carefully selected and ranked by popularity, viral impact & spread.
This weeks Viral Friday #1 position goes to Hillary Wasn’t Lying!. In a speech on Iraq policy last Monday, Hillary Clinton recalled facing “sniper fire” on her 1996 trip to Bosnia. But CBS reporters traveling with her made no reference to any “sniper fire” at the time… So was she lying or did she tell the truth? The runner up spot is for Barely Political with Stop the attacks! Love, Obama Girl. After a one month absence Amber Lee Ettinger, aka Obama Girl, is back with a new music video. In her latest video she asks Hillary to stop her campaign and leave Obama alone. Milk Chocolate: A Love Story completes this week’s top 3. Leah Nelson and Jay Grandin created this ‘bunny love’ stop-motion video to introduce their new company.
Do you want to see this week’s list from 1 to 10? Go on then, and have a look! We’d like to hear your opinion about the virals. Have fun!
Pregnant actress Jessica Alba (Jay_eh) had a little fun over the weekend popping up in a promo for a new social networking site IBeatYou (IBY inc.), co-owned by her fiancé Cash Warren and his basketball player friend Baron David.
The online competition site, where you can compete against anyone in anything using photos, video and text, invited a bunch of users last Saturday and put together a lip-synching along to Panic At The Disco’s new single ‘Nine In The Afternoon‘. Writing about the video on her official MySpace blog, the Fantastic Four star said: “We shot a quirky group lip dub music video for ibeatyou. Check it out!!”
London-based Cadbury, the world’s largest candy maker, has revealed imagery of its sequel to the Dairy Milk ‘Gorilla’ advertisement. The much-anticipated and long-awaited follow-up to Cadbury’s highly successful 2007 ad, viewed over than 10 million times on YouTube and featuring a gorilla playing the drum solo of Phil Collins’ 1981 track ‘In the Air Tonight’, will break this Saturday on March 29, 2008.
The new advert, called ‘Airport Trucks’, is described as a “magical airport truck race”, which have “pimped” themselves to show their real characters, ready for the race of their lives. In the second ‘A Glass and a Half Production’ an animated airport luggage truck will play the role of underdog in a midnight race against an assortment of bigger and faster trucks, such as a baggage transporter and motorised stairs.
In this item you’ll be able to learn all about the power of viral widgets, what brands are using widgets and what do widgets cost?
The didgeridoo is a wind instrument of the Indigenous Australians. Didgeridoo is sometimes described as a natural wooden trumpet or “drone pipe”. Musicologists classify the didgeridoo as an aerophone.
I would classify widgets as: online tools, applications or instruments that can be created, embedded and spread easily by internet users. As social media specialist, I see widgets as a great opportunity for brands to play a whole new ’sound of music’ in the social media space. That’s why I would like to introduce the term: “Widgeridoo”.
The Nissan Live Traffic Widget is a smart way of building brand identity using a software application that can be embedded in e.g. a Facebook page or downloaded to a computer desktop. Also facilitating and smart: the Kraft Foods Recipe Widget.
Universal Records has been on the look out for “monks, men of the cloth and sacred singers” for quite a while and now they found them- thanks to YouTube!. They placed adverts in religious publications hoping to find Gregarian singers, who they could offer a record deal.
They were sent hundreds of demo tapes, but the Youtube video they got from the monks from the Monestary the Holy Cross impressed them most. Tom Lewis, an Universal A&R executive told the BBC Website the following of his latest addition:
“These guys found about the competition through a friend of theirs in London and they sent a link of their monastery and of them singing on YouTube,” he said.
“It was beautiful, beautiful music and they’re using the very latest in terms of communication devices available to them to get their music heard.
The recording will start in April, with the launch of the album scheduled for the end of this year. All profits will be used to train new monks. Presumably to teach them how to leverage social media for the benefit of his monestary.
Where most popular DJ’s and artists receive underwear from their female fans, Ferry Corsten gets a lot of video clips of people dancing and lip syncing to his world famous tunes. He says he enjoys watching them a lot, although maybe not so much as ladies underwear, and it inspired him to write out a contest for his newest tune ‘Into the Dark’.
Fans are asked to send in their craziest, funnies videos of them dancing to ‘Into the Dark’, everything is allowed. Although Ferry does display a sense of humour and a keen sense of what goes on on the internet as anything involving two girls and one cup isn’t allowed. At the end of the contest he’ll make a selection of the best videos, which will then be put into the video clip of the track he created with Howard Jones.
Giving fans (or consumers) a chance to interact with a brand through user generated content can be a great way to enhance engagement. It can also help to create ‘fansumers’ and will give brand advocates a great opportunity to talk about and interact with you.
I think that the Microsoft viral commercial below, shows in a painful way, that advertisers don’t understand modern consumers’ behavior at all. Which I feel is totally true in too many cases.
If I look at the media-mix of many brands, only 3-5% of their total media budget is allocated to online, while the media behavior their target group is spending about 40% of their daily media time at the internet. The brand managers that will not tweak their media-mix, will be the ones that keep complaining: “it’s so difficult to reach my target group these days”.
Online video and the internet has been used a lot in this year’s American presidential election. For example, Mike Huckabee made use of internet cult hero Chuck Norris to promote his campaign. Barack Obama has Obama Girl , which was quickly countered by Taryn Southern who is a Hillary Clinton fan who created the ‘HotforHill’ video.
Ron Paul has both been slammed and praised for the use of social media in his campaign strategy. Some called it spam, others defended it as a smart way to attract attention with a lower budget than other candidates.
Another video which the internet went crazy for and got picked up by the mainstream media was Will.I.Am, member of the Black Eyed Peas, who created a song around one of Obama’s speeches. Which is where the Dutch recruiters step in. VNU Media are looking for Holland’s brightest commercial talent to join their Sales Academy. To try and attract their target audience they have started an online recruitment campaign. They have started a website, called ‘Make your mark here’. And in order to attract attention to their new recruitment campaign they have used one of the most successful campaigning virals and used to promote themselves.
Have a look at the video and let us know if you think this a cheesy rip off, or a smart way to market your brand/campaign.
