Viral Friday: Ken Block’s Trax STI Car

Written by Niels Bellaar on November 6th, 2009 |

Viral Friday is the weekly viral video chart of ViralBlog, showing the 5 most popular viral videos, commercials, games or user-generated videos, carefully selected and ranked by popularity, viral impact & spread.

This week’s Viral Friday #1 position goes to Ken Block’s Trax STI Car. At ViralBlog we are very impressed with the viral videos Ken Block and his team manage to produce; the successful videos promoting Ken, DC Shoes, Subaru, Monster and his other sponsors just keep on coming. The runner up spot is for Google Maps Navigation. Google’s Android is booming, and now Google introduces its own, free, turn-by-turn mobile navigation software. Motorola DROID: Stealth Commercial completes this week’s top 3. Ever since Motorola released its DROID phone through its Droid Does campaign, there has been a lot of buzz about the Google Android 2.0 based smartphone.

Do you want to see this week’s list from 1 to 5? Go on then, and have a look! We’d like to hear your opinion about the virals. Have fun!

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1. Ken Block’s Trax STI Car

At ViralBlog we are very impressed with the viral videos Ken Block and his team manage to produce; the successful videos promoting Ken, DC Shoes, Subaru, Monster and his other sponsors just keep on coming. This video is online since last Monday and already earned the top spot for this week with almost 770,000 views. This time the team turned a Subaru Impreza STI into the world’s fastest snow cat, packing 400bhp.
“It combines a two of my favorite things in life: driving a rally car in the snow and snowboarding in the powder in the backcountry.” says Ken. Full specs and the full story at dcshoes.com/auto.

2. Google Maps Navigation

Google’s Android is booming, and now Google introduces its own, free, turn-by-turn mobile navigation software. It is part of Google Maps for mobile and is available for phones with Android 2.0. The above video is a demonstration video showing the most impressive things the application can do. For a detailed report check Gizmodo. So if you do are always in a coverage area you do not have to pay anymore for navigation software (only for your Android 2.0 phone). On YouTube since October 27, the video got over 855,000 views from all over the world.

3. Motorola DROID: Stealth Commercial

And now some more Android. This new commercial about the Motorola DROID is just great! In fact ever since Motorola released its DROID phone through its Droid Does campaign, there has been a lot of buzz about the Google Android 2.0 -based smartphone. This new commercial is a minute-long spot, obtained by Boy Genius Report TV and features jets, falling bomb-like capsules and apparent sentience of Droid. The Motorola DROID will be available starting TODAY for $199.99. The commercial generated almost 290,000 views within 3 days.

4. Eichborn Fliegenbanner

At this year’s Frankfurter Buchmesse, 200 advertising flies attended. The flies were carrying a little banner attached with wax, promoting the publisher Eichborn. This video shows the result. The idea came from communication agency Jung von Matt/Neckar, responding to the publisher’s subtitle: der Verlag mit der Fliege. Though the stunt caused some stir here and there, none of the flies were harmed: the wax melted after a while so the banner fell off by itself. The video generated over 630,000 views since October 20.

5. The Google Story

This video tells (as its title correctly states) the Google Story. A cute animation takes the viewer from BackRub through all the developments Google has achieved in the past 11 years. The video has been posted on YouTube almost a month ago, but did not get picked up until recently. Now, it has 291,523 views. The video is quite fast-paced, agrees Digital Buzz Blog. But that seems appropriate, considering the story of Google is a fast-paced one too. Luckily, a slow motion version is also available on YouTube.

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3 Comments

• Marc Metekohy says:

  November 6, 2009 at 12:18

  I really liked the flies-with-banners idea.

  Reply
• Paul van Veenendaal says:

  November 6, 2009 at 13:12

  Enjoyable Viral Friday! Although I’m missing some popular ones of this week, like Drink Driving on Forklift with 1.3 million views and the best of ‘m all Christopher Walken & Poker Face: Over 2 million views. Another popular one: Taylor Swift Pranked By Ellen Degeneres with 3.5 million views.

  Reply
  • Niels Bellaar says:

    November 6, 2009 at 14:49

    Thanks for the input Paul! Though these are definitely viral videos we aim to inspire marketers and thus try to only include brand related virals. I know Christofer Walken, South park, Taylor Swift and Ellen DeGeneres can be seen as brands too, but I guess you catch my drift.

    Reply