Types of viral videos

Posted on January 6, 2010 by IdeaMonster

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A brief recognition of the types of viral videos floating around the web with selected, recent examples.

First type is the “Your face here” viral video, spread most recently (after the stupid dancing elves) by a swedish “our hero” campaign.
Now this is very well made and it shows that a lot of money was put into the production of this viral, and that’s one of the reasons it’s so successful – it seems “real” when you see your own face on all those pictures inside the video. The technology makes it believable and that counts! Here’s the link : Great swedish Viral

The other type is the funky “Whoa! They did a great job” type of regular ads, that don’t try to pretend they’re not an ad. Instead they are so creative and innovative + just plain “new” that people send them out and about anyway. Here’s the most recent “Google Chrome ad video” :

Yet another type is “we know it’s an Ad for a respectable company, but look how stupid it is” and here we have a winner in form of the MSI slim laptops and showing they’re so thin you can catch one with your butt. Most consumers will probably think : Hey , are they showing us where their laptops belong? But all in all it does spread anyway. Here’s a preview :

Then there are those “not yet used ideas” like the guys jumping into pants. The pants are not branded (yet, cause I’m sure the idea will be bought by some major jeans company sooner or later). They did it as a trick and to show their skills, but the marketing value of it is pretty big if used properly. Here’s the video:
Update : I’ve heard that the idea was made into a commercial later on. 5 million youtube views does account for something.

Then there’s the lipdub (just type lip dub in youtube search and you’ll get millions of videos) but that’s not really a comercial thing that much. There are also weird, funny and / or stupid songs videos. The proud winner in that category is microsoft songsmith – which went viral in seconds after the release of the video. The song is so terrible that it spreads unbelievably fast. Oh and they use a mac during the video ;)

Update: And finally, almost forgot about it, there’s the wacky science, represented by mentos + diet coke “experiments”. Don’t forget your lab coats for such videos, that makes them more believable. ;)

But truly anything can be viral, not necessarily commercial in value. Any more ideas?

Is this the time to make money with Viral advertising?

Posted on December 26, 2009 by IdeaMonster

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Since a good portion of nowadays virals online (especially holiday related but not necessarily) are spread mostly by people with families and what’s most important – jobs – maybe now it finally pays off to guide them to a product itself, not just a hype or a company logo. If so we might get yet another boost in internet sales which are going up constantly anyway with various new ways. E-book virals anyone? That might be a hit of the future and I’m sure to try it as soon as ebooks will be decent (or when apple releases it’s take on the subject – january 26?)

Stupid virals directed to younger audience can also sell a product but it creates at least a two-person chain from wanting something to buying something. Without the middlemen the buying urge can be direct and more successful.
We’ll see what happens next. Aside from the holidays there are also the “office virals” since half the time in the office we spend fooling around online. What better way to waste time than with a funny video or a wacky flash animation with your boss’ face on it. Or you can even shoot your boss out of a catapult in a clever flash game and compare your score with other happy co-workers. The ad is of course for a job agency, and I bet they had a raise in pageviews after. So is holiday-office related viral a thing of the future that we should focus on the most? Probably.
Because all I don’t want for christmas is a PSP ;)
Happy new year! I hope we will see some more creative approaches and no more dancing elves or santas in 2010!

Space’y design + Pixelmator

Posted on December 19, 2009 by IdeaMonster

A while ago I designed the cover artwork for the “Krop” music project. The idea was to be as “from outer space” as possible, and at the same time have some of that 80’s look to it. Since that’s the decade the aliens came to earth anyway.

I used pixelmator pixelmator a 59$ photoshop wanna-be app for the Mac. It’s faster than the big brother, has a lot of the same tools (some stuff is lacking but we can’t have everthing for 59$, right?) and is pretty easy to use. If you own a mac and want to have a cheap photoshop alternative go give it a try.
I used a lot of duplicates of the character with different blurs and color settings + some painting over with a rainbow gradient and masks.
Then some noise with low opacity was added to give it a feel of the 80’s even more. I will also be in charge of the music videos to follow, so I guess it’ll also be about similar effects there too.
Go check it all out at kropband.com

Season greetings from the viral!

Posted on December 16, 2009 by IdeaMonster

virals

So how long can we be drawn brainlessly by “funny videos” that after a while are a common-wealth – seen by nearly everybody we know.
Are they gonna surprise us with billboards saying “In 2010 everything you know will change”? Do we really anticipate the knowledge of what will happen then? Or did we simply stop caring about it. Do we even discuss out-of-the-internet examples with anyone? Don’t think so.
Human imagination is pretty vast, so I bet there’s still a couple of good ideas undiscovered, but all in all we’ll be bound by funnier and funnier seasonal virals that we post even with the knowledge that it does more good to the maker, than to the sender. Yes, it has started. From dancing Santa with your face on him, through the last-year-hype dancing elves (elfyourself.com) up to whatever else we can come up with. Maybe a present that blows up when you open it? Smurfs-viral fun with a christmas twist? Why not. The notion that fuelled the first seasonal campaigns a couple of years back is now gone. They don’t try to impress us by the idea, just the packaging.
Dancing characters with your face on them were done before a couple of times, and this time the whole packaging made it look “fresh” and “oh so funny” to many, many adults.
But hey! Are the older parts of the internet currently more into viral than the younger?
That’s the interesting part – seasonal “fun stuff” is usually sent around by people with jobs, families, often children etc. Not by kids with too much time on their hands.
Maybe the next generation virals should be directed at the respected parents instead?
I’ve seen a catapult-a-santa viral where you could upload your face, and a good % of the faces were someone’s little babies.
So maybe there’s still hope to surprise, just by looking elsewhere?
To be continued…

OmmWriter Equivalent for the PC ?

Posted on December 14, 2009 by IdeaMonster

I am a mac person. But at work I’m forced to reckon with the evil empire outburst known as microsoft windows. I discovered ommWriter and got hooked on how easy it is to silence all the shit from around and focus – think. At first I thought that experience cannot be duplicated for the bulky, ugly PC world. But I was wrong. Of course it’s not the same, but the differences let me have my sanity intact – the mac and pc worlds are different after all anyway. So here it is Ladies and Gents : DarkRoom
Of course it’s free, and reminds me a bit of the good ol’ days of hackers in 80’s movies and stuff like early DOS.
The cool thing is the simplicity, combined with a way to make the black screen transparent a little bit (while set to 98% opacity it has a nice “texture” from what’s behind but nothing’s really catching the eye)
The ugly green font is supposed to be retro, but we can change the font and background colors to anything we like. This time I think white text on a semi-transparent black background does it for me!.