PSY Gangnam Style: The Anatomy Of A Super Viral Hit

Gangnam Style by PSY is highly entertaining and extremely viral with 408 million views and counting. We predicted a viral cult hit, now we are showing you the anatomy of a super viral…

The South Korean superstar is breaking all records, including the Guinness World Record of most liked video – 3.725.463 likes – in the history of YouTube.

More records are broken by the Gangnam Style phenomenon. Here you will get more interesting, fun but also very relevant video marketing insights…

Consumers and brands are launching social videos onto the web. And that’s the understatement of the year. We upload 72 hours of video to YouTube every minute!

Marketing used to be an art, now it’s a science. So big-data? May the math be with you.

Our way of predicting viral video hits is called ViralTracker. We use it for predictive modelling and adaptive planning purposes.

First we rate and benchmark the video content. Next we create a smart POE plan and budget proposal in order to get the highest ROI possible.

First it was MTV that invited PSY to star at the MTV Video Music Awards as surprise guest. Next PSY starred on CNN.

How viral can build brand awareness? The unknown PSY was contracted by famous promoter Scooter Brown within 2 weeks after eleaseing his Gangnam Style video clip.

The PSY Gangnam style video had been shared on the internet numerous times by celebrities such as Katy Perry and Britney Spears was Tweeting about it.

Next PSY was invited to the Ellen Show to teach Britney the Gangnam Style dance moves.

Online parodies popped-up from all over the world. Animates videos, a parody in lifeguard style and children’s cartoons as ‘My Little Pony’ are listed in the top 10 Gangnam Style parodies, set-up by entertainment website The Hollywood Reporter.

Have you seen this list of animated gifs at Mashable?

Maybe even smarter, how Gifboom tapped into the popular Gangnam Style animated gifs. Our previous story here on ViralBlog.

And due to insistent public demand, the world renowned dancing inmates of the Cebu prison in the Philippines finally had their own version of the Gangnam Style music video.

After 4 weeks US screenagers were introduced in a panel to the Gangnam Style video. Some seem to know this was K-Pop, many found it weird or hilarious.

But one guy thought he had heard Open Condom Store instead of Oppa Gangnam Style. See the panel interview on video here:

If you might see PSY as one-off viral hit or just another K-Pop gimmick, you might want to watch this live concert in Seoul. See how 80.000 fans are going crazy during an outstanding performance and a show that makes Lady Gaga look like a pop rookie?

If you think he is a lucky shot, bear in mind that PSY created the lyrics, the choreography and video clip of Gangnam Style all by himself.

If South Korea wanted to grow its tourism, they should get PSY as their epic center and anchor. He earned massive global attention for South Korea and K-Pop.

If you want to learn more about the anatomy of the PSY Gangnam Style viral cult hit, we suggest you check below infographic. This one was published when the clip was at 141 million views.

The second infographic was released one week later. So if you are a true big-data freak and nerd like us, we hope you will enjoy the below insights and viral anatomy here:

The buzz around Gangnam Style on Twitter and Facebook has been massive. The servers of Last.fm, Spotify and iTunes were smoking.

We tried to find out how many Gangnam Style ringtones were sold to mobile phones and smart phones since 15 July 2012, but unfortunately we can only guess how massive the numbers must be.

In the digital era, content is king, distribution queen but metrics the emperor. Great viral content can help to earn massive attention for free, and technology can help you to detect a viral in an early stage.

We hope that CMOs will embrace the social video phenomenon and think about the opportunity of Social GRPs: the sum of P+O+E views.

Our message: If you look beyond the P, you might discover how great content could increase the ROI on your media investments.

The POE mix by PSY is clear: Create compelling viral content and distribute it via owned media and the social web to maximize offline and online buzz, awareness and SoV.

Next PSY is pulling fans gently through his funnel towards: trial, preference and advocacy.

We hope you have enjoyed this PSY Gangnam Style trilogy here at ViralBlog? We would love to hear you thoughts.

More more trends on marketing, music and video follow Igor Beuker on Twitter or subscribe to the ViralBlog RSS Feed to be the first to know.