There’s an article over on AdAge about Samsung’s recent viral ad success. We’ll get to that, but first, the video:
The video, created and produced by UK-based The Viral Factory, has been a YouTube hit, generating over a million hits on the original version and thousands more in reposts. Probably the most important aspect of the campaign was the way it challenged viewers to try and figure out how they did it. According to AdAge’s interview with Matt Cutler, vice president of marketing & analytics at Visible Measures, a company that analyzes video watching data similar to Nielsen in the TV market, “the average viewer [of this video] watched over 1:50 of a 1:43 spot, so it proved highly engaging; people rewinding, rewatching, and trying to figure out what’s going on.”
In addition to that, a follow up video was posted that first showed the many different ideas by YouTube users about how the video was made, followed by comments that correctly pointed out the clues that gave away the true answer. Here’s the follow up video:
As Matt Cutler summarized, “We think [the Samsung campaign] is indicative of modern brand-building and advertising, sort of a glimpse of the future.” There have been successful similar campaigns in the past; in August 2007 a YouTube user posted a video of a glitch in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 that allows a player to hit a ball from a water hazard, and in August 2008 EA released their response, a video of Tiger Woods recreating the glitch in real life, ‘walking’ on water and hitting his ball from the middle of a water hazard. The video was wildly popular, generating over 3 million views to date.
While some companies have been very forward thinking in their online advertising strategies, many others have been overly cautious. But with broadband access and internet usage growing every day, and the measurable success of web video advertising campaigns, the question of “Who is advertising with web video?” will soon become “Who isn’t advertising with web video?”
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