Viral Friday: United Breaks Guitars

Written by Niels Bellaar on July 17th, 2009 | 5 comments

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.
ViralFriday

This weeks Viral Friday #1 position goes to United Breaks Guitars. Dave Carroll is the singer in a band. In the spring of 2008 they traveled with United Airlines. They broke his guitar and refuse to pay for it, so Dave wrote a song about his experience. The runner up spot is for Office 2010: The Movie. A movie about Office 2010? Yes, packed with action and at moments even funny! Bleeding Billboard completes this week’s top 3. The local governments of Franklin District Council and Papakura District Council in New Zealand have taken remarkable precautions in order to decrease fatal car accidents.

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. United Breaks Guitars

Dave Carroll is the singer in a band called Sons Of Maxwell (listen to their songs on their YouTube channel). In the spring of 2008 the band traveled to Nebraska with United Airlines. A lot happened that trip, read it all on Dave’s blog. In short: Dave brought a very expensive Taylor guitar that experienced rough handling by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago, resulting in severe damage to the guitar. United refused to pay for the damage, so Dave decided to write a song about his experience with United. And so he did. His song got viewed almost 3.2 million times on YouTube in 11 days and 15,486 viewers left a comment. Now United experiences the force of social media. I bet United will feel this.

2. Office 2010: The Movie

Microsoft is buzzing a lot lately. Windows 7 buzz, Project Natal, laptop hunters and now the Office 2010 including an exciting teaser and trailer video. The teaser and trailer seem to be made for a new movie with a lot of action and on some moments are quite funny.
Old veteran Clippy is no longer and now the battle has begun to track and trace a hacker who has released a new font on the internet. An entertaining trailer and afterward people can visit the site.

Big news about Office 2010 are the Office Web applications, lighter versions of Word, PowerPoint and Excel which will compete with Google Docs.

3. Bleeding Billboard

The local governments of Franklin District Council and Papakura District Council in New Zealand have taken remarkable precautions in order to decrease fatal car accidents. The first heavy rains after summer, bring the highest death toll on New Zealand roads. In order to lower the road toll they placed a bleeding billboard. The billboard features a young boy whose eyes, nose and ears bleed when it rains. And the message reads: “Rain changes everything. Drive to the conditions”.

The Bleeding Billboard was developed by Colenso BBDO and was awarded with a Bronze Design Lion at Cannes International Advertising Festival. Local, national and even international media picked up the story, driving awareness for weather conditions and driving habits. Online the video generated almost 1 million YouTube views. As a result, the district of Papakura faced zero death tolls.

4. The PEN Story

Mireille already wrote about it: the PEN story. For the 50th anniversary of the PEN cameras, Olympus created a stop motion video. They shot 60,000 pictures, developed 9,600 of them and then reshot 1,800 pics. And there was no post production.

Within two weeks the video generated over 670,000 views on YouTube and judging by the comments The PEN Story is highly appreciated by the viewers. As well as the song that accompanies the video. Next to the video, NEUE DIGITALE GmbH, created a website for the PEN story, where you can also download the song by Johannes Stankowski.

5. O.M.G.I.G.P: Internet Explorer 8

Not everything went as planned this week for Microsoft. Their recently launched “Browse Better” campaign, to promote Internet Explorer 8, showcased 4 different movies with Dean Cain called “Special Internet Service Announcements”. One movie however was too much according to many: the movie shows a woman vomiting when she uses her husband’s laptop. The reactions were mixed, but many thought it was too much. Microsoft was forced to pull the movie. However, this movie responsible for 57% of all views of the complete campaign and nearly 60% of comments are related to this movie. With over 800,000 views this is the most successful movie of the Browse Better campaign. Who knows, perhaps Microsoft actually did plan it this way. It is a viral success.

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