I Can Haz Viral

A Short Primer on Viral Awesomeness

Three things you should consider before launching a viral campaign

1. Does your content target your audience? With true viral dissemination, it’s the content
not the media that achieves your targeting. If you want to reach drum-playing dads, make
something that millions of people will want to forward to drum-playing dads and launch it
everywhere at once for maximum exposure.
2. What are you trying to learn? Like the record, movie and VC industries, viral video is a
hits business. Depending on how high exactly you set the bar, somewhere between 90%
and 99% of your efforts to create a viral sensation will fail. So be clear about what you’re
trying to learn, how you’re trying to learn it, and how you’ll use that insight to do better
next time. Fail fast. Fail cheap. Rinse. Repeat.
3. What are you trying to achieve? If you’re trying to get a million views on YouTube
because you want to look hip or influence radio playlists, don’t measure record sales. And
vice versa. Be honest! Creative and media strategies are often hobbled by trying to
achieve too many objectives at once, a dysfunction frequently caused by a failure to
openly and clearly set and prioritize campaign objectives.

Three must-haves of great viral content

1. Emotional resonance. Great virals connect emotionally with viewers in powerful ways
that elicit involuntary, physical responses – laughter, tears, goose bumps, cringes,
flinches, blushes, hot flushes, mouth-gapes, hand-wringings, head-slappings. In no
particular order, the key triggers are humour, shock, sex, visual spectacle, inspiration,
cuteness, randomness, originality, and illumination. And remember that humour is
woefully overused.
2. Personal relevance. People tend to forward stuff because it’s relevant to them and / or
relevant to the recipient. At the limit case, people feel so connected with the content – it
strikes such a chord – that the encoded message appears to impinge profoundly on their
own sense of self, leading them to proselytize the importance of the experience to
everyone they know because they think it’s relevant to everyone they know.
3. Memetic power. The very best virals go further still. They either mutate an existing
meme or create a new one. That is, they create or mutate an idea, where that idea is both
easy to copy and, for a variety of cultural reasons, extremely likely to be copied. A meme
is often manifested as a fun but formulaic motif that permits low-barrier contributions.
Changing the soundtrack to an existing video (Cadbury’s Gorilla), replacing song lyrics
with a literal description of the video (Literal Music Videos), typing mis-spelt slogans over
cute pictures of cats (Lolcats), or holding an impromptu flash mob dance in a railway
station (Frozen Grand Central, T-Mobile Dance) are excellent examples of successful,
culturally virulent memes.

Three ‘don't’s of viral

1. Don’t be evil. Don’t spam email lists. Don’t ask agencies to astroturf. Don’t incentivize
bloggers or media owners to help you out without disclosing the incentive. And don’t fib.
This stuff is illegal, unethical, and extremely likely to harm your reputation in the long-
run.

Copyright © Unruly Media Ltd 2010 All Rights Reserved

 2. Don’t freeload. If anything is guaranteed to get up the nose of your global, cool-hunting
influencer, it’s a minted megacorp asking them to promote its content for free because (a)
the content’s exclusive, (b) there’s no budget, and (c) there may be some budget next
time. Usually at least two of these claims turn out to be lies. Lies that can be smelled a
mile-off and which will be gleefully exposed by your friendly neigbourhood cool-hunter.
3. Don’t use contests. Contests are anti-viral. The more people you tell, the smaller the
chance you have of winning. Only consider a contest as a mechanic if it encourages
people to rope in large numbers of their friends with a view to winning some sort of
shared experience.

Three ‘do’s of viral

1. Turn the dial to ‘eleven’: find and focus on the killer aspect of your content. With
humour, funny isn’t good enough. Only laugh-out loud hilarious is good enough. Trying to
do something that is pretty funny and quite newsworthy and contains somewhat famous
celebrities and has excellent production values is pretty much guaranteed to fail. Once
you’ve committed to the killer aspect, you can focus all your energies on executing it
superbly and ignoring – yes ignoring – everything else.
2. Spend at least as much on seeding, media, and PR as you do on producing the
content. Why? Because the interweb is not just awash with content, it’s awash with great
viral content! If you want your film to catch fire before next Tuesday, you’d better give it
some help. Also think about it this way. The excellence of your content will have a
magnifying effect on your media spend. The earned media amplifies the bought. So the
better the content, the greater the return on your media spend, and the more you spend
on media, the greater your absolute return. Almost every great commercially-sponsored
viral video success story supports and justifies this rule of thumb: it may not be what you
want to hear, but it’s the truth.
3. Use specialists. Sorry, but The Viral Factory is much better than JWT at content and
Unruly Media is much better than MPG at media planning and buying when it comes to
viral. Sure, every big agency will have its day in the sun. But to create and foster success
reliably and regularly requires decades of domain knowledge and a focus and
commitment that brooks no distractions.

Three examples of great viral videos and why they worked

1. T-Mobile ‘Dance’. Probably the most successful UK commercial viral of 2009, ‘Dance’
riffed on the Flash Mob meme, with an explicit hat tip to Improv Everywhere’s ‘Frozen
Grand Central’. Uplifting, optimistic and expansive, people forwarded the clip because it
made them smile, especially when they could use it to cheer up a fellow commuter. 1m
views in the first weekend, over 25m views to date, extraordinary word-of-mouth, and
credited with lifting handset sales by 22% during the week it launched. Unruly Media
Case Study >
2. Evian ‘Roller Babies’. The most viewed online advertisement ever, according to The
Guinness Book of Records, ‘Roller Babies’ was super-cute or super-creepy, depending on
your point of view, but pretty much off the wall either way. Over 60m views to date and
over 400k fans on Facebook. Nielsen research in France showed that 95% of people who
saw the ad online had not seen the spot on TV and two thirds who saw it wanted to share it
with friends. Unruly Media Case Study >
3. OK Go ‘This Too Shall Pass’. With over 10m views to date OK Go’s latest video
incorporates and plays with the props and elements of many successful memes that have
gone before, but the setting and overarching concept owe the largest debt to Honda’s
‘Cog’. Sony Bravia’s ‘Balls’ and ‘Paint’, Guinness’ ‘Tipping Point’, Pot Noodle’s ‘Tipping
Pot’, and even OK Go's own previous viral hits are also brought to bear on the execution,
which takes the classic Domino Rally meme to new levels. Unruly Media Blog Post >

Copyright © Unruly Media Ltd 2010 All Rights Reserved