Viral Friday: Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade

Viral Friday is the weekly viral video chart of ViralBlog, showing the 5 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 Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. Until Thanksgiving Day 2008 few if any people had been Rickrolled live by the real Rick Astley. The runner up spot is for the Simpsons with Mapple. Last Sunday, November 30th, a Simpsons episode involved a consumer-electronics company known as Mapple, the one that makes Mipods and Miphones. Zune Paint completes this week’s top 3. The marketers at Microsoft must have seen Sony’s paint ad and wanted to do ‘something with paint’ as well…

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!

1. Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade

Earlier this year SurveyUSA estimated that 18 Million people in the US have had the video for Rick Astley’s 1987 pop gem Never Gonna Give You Up foisted upon them, but until Thanksgiving Day 2008 few if any people had been Rickrolled live by the real Rick Astley. Astley popped up on the Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends‘ float at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The video, and 4 duplicates, generated almost 1.5 million views since it was uploaded November 27th.
(Source: Laughing Squid)

2. Mapple

Last Sunday, November 30th, a Simpsons episode involved a consumer-electronics company known as Mapple, the one that makes Mipods and Miphones. At the Springfield Mall, Lisa is amazed at (M)Apple products. And Comic book guy talks about the benefits of OS 4.0. She “inherits” Krusty’s old miPod (which he gets at the Jewish Clown Awards). Steve Mobs also makes an appearance. Bart overdubs Steve on the big cube, and is followed by a Mapple store mob. Comic book guy throws a hammer into the screen, just like in Apple’s 1984 ad.
(Source: Technologizer, Dailymotion)

3. Zune Paint

The marketers at Microsoft must have seen Sony’s paint ad (who hasn’t?) and wanted to do ‘something with paint’ as well for their Zune mp3 player. Only just playing with paint obviously isn’t appealing enough for the Zune target group, so they added a little twist. Beautiful.

4. Ribery – Pink Panther

Nike launched a new football shoe, the Mercurial Vapor IV. And it’s pink. To promote the shoe and (and it’s color, which is pretty new to the football world) Wieden + Kennedy/Amsterdam reprised the intro to The Pink Panther. The intro is now featuring Franck Ribéry, who obviously doesn’t mind wearing pink.

5. Immersion

Ever wondered what you look lilke when playing video games? Photographer Robbie Cooper has made a video showing just how goofy kids look while they game. Immersion, as Cooper calls this project, came about as the result of a previous experiment, Alter Ego. He had become interested in the virtual worlds of multiplayer online games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft. He started photographing players alongside the digital ‘avatars’ that represented them in those virtual worlds. He found middle-aged male academics masquerading as female dwarfs; office workers as undead warriors; disabled teenagers as fighting robots.
(Source: Geekologie, Telegraph)