Producing a successful promotional campaign through the platform of YouTube has become increasing popular over the last 10 years whilst YouTube as grown as a platform in itself, with YouTube themselves reporting that:

YouTube has over a billion users–almost a third of all people on the Internet–and every day, people watch hundreds of millions of hours of YouTube videos and generate billions of views. (YouTube 2015)

Leaving this platform of YouTube open for brands to generate free exposure if they create the perfect “Viral” campaign.

So how does a video campaign become viral?

A viral campaign is one that is considered to be viewed a large number of times and shared around the Internet through multiple social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and YouTube. A campaign can become viral over night and if a brand creates the perfect viral campaign it can ultimately create large brand exposure and generate a traffic towards their website or help them achieve their desired message from the campaign.

(Henke 2012) wrote that a viral video is similar to word of mouth describing “Viral” as an electronic word of mouth process. With the author also suggesting brands will use multiple tactics in an attempt to go viral, these could include shock tactics which is when a viewer becomes shocked by something they’ve seen, also humorous videos can go viral such as pranks and videos that connect with the viewers emotions can also be successful. Henke writes that these types of videos will force viewers to share with their peers on social media in an aim to allow their peers to experience the emotions as them.

Examples of Viral Campaigns  

John Lewis Christmas Adverts

Views: 23 Million within 2 months.

23,000 Social Media mentions 2 hours after release – New Record. (Williams 2015) 

John Lewis started producing its first Christmas advert in 2007 however the first campaign did not go viral until 2011 with a young boy who could not wait until Christmas. Since this point John Lewis have been extremely clever with the promotional campaigns with customers looking forward to the Christmas advert year in year out. This has been extremely successful for the business as the videos generate a buzz around the business at the most important time of the year – Christmas. Christmas is a time for giving and John Lewis know their price point is not the lowest meaning at Christmas customers will be prepared to spend that little bit extra to purchase the perfect gift.

LG Elevator Prank

October 2012 – over 24 Million views

LG created an evaluator prank where the floor looks as if it falls in on people who use the lift giving them a funny scare. According to YouTube 2015 pranks tend to be received well on YouTube and connect with a wide audience. Producing this video was very clever by LG as the floor was multiple LG TV’s which would show customers the picture was so clear that people think the floor falling away was real. The high number of views generated strong exposure for LG and LG have since created other prank videos in an attempt to achieve similar success. 

Other YouTube collaboration campaigns:

Not all promotional campaigns on YouTube need to go viral in order to generate a successful outcome, brands can use YouTube to collaborate with existing YouTubers who already have ready-made audiences to generate their desired exposure.

Examples of this method:

Krave cereal – Krave cereal has been working with multiple different YouTube content creators challenging them to different tasks, which are relevant to the style of their channel. Krave were promoting their summer collaboration with Alton Towers along with these challenges. By choosing multiple content creators instead of just one person Krave were covering a large proportion of their target market and made good use of repetitive advertising.

Vloggers were chosen based on their popularity amongst Krave’s target demographic, namely 15- to 19-year-olds. (Nias 2013)

Example of one of the video produced:

543,000 Views on a channel with just under 900,000 subscribers.

Simple Skincare

Simple skincare teamed up with YouTube content creator Zoella to run their campaign called skin social. During the campaign Zoella and Simple produced multiple different videos for each of their channels promoting their campaign called Skin Social, Zoella has the perfect audience for the campaign with just under 10 million subscribers with the average viewer being a teenage girl (Marr 2014).

Most popular video produced: Over 2 million Views on Youtube.com/Zoella.

In conclusion there are multiple different ways of using YouTube for advertising and it is a fairly new market meaning brands are still discovering the best way to use the platform that is available suggesting we can only expect more and more brands looking to use YouTube in the future.

All Promotional Campaigns mentioned above can be viewed below:

John lewis Christmas Advert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuz2ILq4UeA

LG Elevator Prank: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeXMxuNNlE8

Krave Challenge Videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kf1tEwD6mPw

Zoella – Simple Skincare collaboration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0in_9j25uCI

References:

Crimmsons, L . (2014). The top viral marketing campaigns of all time. Available: https://www.branded3.com/blog/the-top-10-viral-marketing-campaigns-of-all-time/. Last accessed 27th Jan 2016.

Henke, L. (2012). Viral marketing and music videos: when shock tactics backfire. Journal of behavioral studies in business. 5 (1), 1.

Marr, W. (2014). Zoella, Tanya Burr and the UK’s YouTube superstars. Available: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/11031778/Zoella-Tanya-Burr-and-the-UKs-YouTube-superstars.html. Last accessed 27th Jan 2016.

Nias, S. (2013). Kellogg’s turns to YouTube to promote summer Krave campaign. Available: http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/article/1185684/kelloggs-turns-youtube-promote-summer-krave-campaign. Last accessed 27th Jan 2016.

Williams, A. (2015). Move over Monty! John Lewis’s Man on the Moon Christmas ad breaks records with 23,000 online mentions in just TWO HOURS Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3306855/Move-Monty-Jo. Available: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3306855/Move-Monty-John-Lewis-s-Man-Moon-Christmas-ad-breaks-records-23-000-online-mentions-just-TWO-HOURS.html. Last accessed 27th Jan 2016.

YouTube. (2016). Statistics. Available: https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/en-GB/statistics.html. Last accessed 27th Jan 2016.