It has been difficult to ignore the increase in viral video ad campaigns lately. If you haven’t noticed, viral videos have become a powerful advertising strategy for many corporations. Volkswagen created The Fun Theory, MicroBilt sponsors I Love Local Commercials, and Evian’s creepy roller skating babies helped make their Live Young campaign a viral success. A cleverly disguised T-Mobile advertisement does a great job at mimicking those low-quality, flash-mob-caught-on-tape videos. It takes two and-a-half minutes of watching the video before you realize you’ve been duped into watching an advertisement.
So, is this it? Is this the end of homemade viral videos? Can we even begin to compete with the millions of dollars that go into making and promoting these corporate viral video ad campaigns? Should we even bother?
Time Magazine’s recent article, YouTube Effect: Making Money from Viral Video, discusses the recent success people have had with their homemade viral videos. The makers of Keyboard Cat and David After Dentist, among others, have seized various opportunities to further market their successful videos, enabling them to earn tens of thousands of dollars each.
It’s becoming quite obvious that video-sharing sites and social media have become great tools for raking in the dough. And yes, corporations have figured this out, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we should just give up and allow Keyboard Cat to play us off, does it?
Can you get more people to take the stairs by making it fun to do? That’s the question asked in Piano Stairs, a new viral video that has reached well over 2.5 million views on YouTube in just under two weeks.
Piano Stairs is part of a Volkswagen viral video marketing campaign called “The Fun Theory.” Their theory? “Fun can change behavior for the better.” They set-forth to prove their theory by turning plain, old stairs into a fully functioning keyboard and filming the public’s reaction to it. Not only is the video an interesting approach to creating social change, but it’s fun to watch, as well.
With an abundance of internet video-sharing sites, such as YouTube and Vimeo, it’s becoming easier to share our own thought-provoking videos with the world. All it takes is one question, a camcorder and a little bit of work, and you, too, could have the next viral video.
I’ve been having an interesting conversation with school instructor Dylan Bennett over a blog post I made on Monday about a viral video on YouTube.
The video is a well choreographed piece by film students in Montreal using a popular song.
Mr. Bennett was commenting about how, as a video production instructor, he strives to teach his students not only the video producing skills and techniques but also the rules and ethics that go along with being a video producer.
We often write in Videomaker about how legally and ethically one shouldn’t use copyright music without permission, and how, even recently, YouTube has taken down people’s fun videos because they used 10-seconds of a song without permission from the copyright holder. But, apparently, the rules are changing.
Mr. Bennett sent me this blog post that Google put up this week, saying it’s OK to use copyright music, TV shows, or other approved media on YouTube… “if”… and it’s a big IF. If the record company/TV network/copyright holder sees a financial benefit to them.
JibJab has been a rite of passage for political campaigns (particularly presidential politics) for years, but there’s a lot of recent talk about the effect of Tina Fey impersonating Sarah Palin generating some of the highest ratings that Saturday Night Live has had in years… and, similarly, some rather amazing traffic figures for NBC’s web site.
Increasingly, we’re starting to wonder whether online videos are getting to the point where, like the sales of Halloween masks of the candidates, the candidate with the most hits wins. There’s a bit of precedent to this already, where the 2006 Virginia senate race appears to have been strongly influenced by a viral video of then-incumbent Senator George Allen making a racial slur at a supporter of his opponent, Jim Webb (one of the current senators from Virginia, having beaten Allen by a slim margin).
Could it be that politics are now decided largely by quick, but highly influential, videos for those of us with short attention spans? Is this a good thing for democracy? Is this evolutionary or devolutionary?
I’ve been having an interesting conversation with school instructor Dylan Bennett over a blog post I made on Monday about a 
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