In 2013, FaceBook introduced video adverts in users new feeds, taking a slice of the global TV advertising market. The adverts plays automatically in FaceBook fees, though the sound if off, in an attempt to grab users attention and allow marketers to be more creative with their digital content. FaceBook said “This video format is ideal for marketers who are looking to make a large-scale impact, and for people who will discover more great content in their news feeds”(Kuchler & Hannah, 2013) Carolyn Everson, FaceBook’s vice-president of global marketing solution said that ‘I don’t believe TV is the first screen any more…Mobile is the primary screen’.

Carolyn seemed to be right as the amount of adverts on FaceBook news feed more than tripled in 2014 (Frier, 2015). In addition, FaceBook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckberg said in a November public question-and-answer that in 5 years, most FaceBook will be videos (Frier, 2015).

Marketers have asked to FaceBook how their advertise will lead to sales. Simo is FaceBook director of product in charge of video and he says that FaceBook is at the beginning of understanding what video on FaceBook is about and for this reason Facebook had to create new metrics for marketers to evaluate video-ad campaign including how many people clicked on a link at the end of a video (Frier, 2015).

Nevertheless, we all know that when a video of a brand goes viral there is a big change that the sales will increase.  In fact, extensive commercial instances of viral marketing succeed in real life. For example, Nike Inc. used social networking websites such as Orkut and FaceBook to market products successfully (Long, 2014).

Existing studies on viral marketing assume implicitly that all users in the social network are of interest for a specific product being promoted via viral marketing, which, however, is not true in some cases. For instance, a young student might not be of interest for the company when the product being promoted is a product designed for the old. In these cases, it is a necessity to provide the company an option to specify which users in the social network are of interest in order to influence the truly potential customers effectively(Long, 2014).

A lot of models about how the influence process works have been proposed such as the Independent Cascade Model (IC Model) and the Linear Threshold Mode (LT Mode). However, they fail to consider the common scenario of viral marketing companies. Motivated by this phenomenon, Long (2014) proposes a new paradigm of viral marketing called Interest-Specified Viral Marketing, where the company can specify which users are of interest when promoting a specific product. To this purpose, we assume that each user in the social network is associated with a set of attribute values and the company can specify the users to be of interest by providing a set AI of attribute values. Consequently, all users that contain some attribute values from AI correspond to the users that are of interest. Note that a user is of interest to a company means that the company has interest in this user (the product of the company is designed for the group of users which includes this user), which further implies that this user would probably be interested in the product. Thus, “user interest” and “company interest” co-exists in our Interest-Specified Viral Marketing paradigm, rendering a more effective marketing strategy because it provides the option to focus on only the truly potential customers (Long, 2014).

However marketers should not just consider the “user interest” factor, but also the type of emotion that will affect the viewer when watching the ad. Shawbel (2013) stated that the key of a successful video is to focus on psychology, not technology. A research by Phelps et al (2004) evaluated that messages that spark strong emotion such as humour, fear, sadness or inspiration are most likely to be forwarded.

The video below brought a lot of people to tears during Christmas season and it was viewed by more than 23,1M people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iccscUFY860

 

In addition, Milkman and Berger (2012) identified what certain contents are more likely to go viral than other:

1-when is positive, dwelling on positive issues or topics.

2- it evoked a strong emotional reaction (joy, fear, anger).

3- it was practically useful.

The following ads portrays at least one of the characteristics listed above and may be the reason why they are the most successful videos ever shared on social network.

TNT 

TNT ‘push to add drama stunt in Belgium. This video has over 52.4M views and was so successful that a sequel was made to launch TNT in the Netherlands.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=316AzLYfAzw

Air New Zealand

To celebrate the release of the third film of Hobbit trilogy film, Air New Zealand released the best safety briefing of all time. This ad killed two birds with one stone as they are advertising the film and since the video went viral Air New Zealand was by over 14,1M around the world.

LG Elevator Prank

Promoting how ‘lifelike’ its new IPS monitors, LG pulled this brilliant stunt replacing an elevator floor with monitors to make it look like the floor was falling away. This proves that it is a great idea for a company to combined its product with comedy stunts  since it reached over 23.4M views.

Those above are the most successful viral videos campaigns. However, only few know how to do it right. The videos below show creators not being sensible towards minority groups and also not respecting cultural differences. 

Groupon

During the 2011 Super Bowl, the e-commerce site Groupon aired three advertisements. In most cases, any company airing a memorable ad during Super Bowl Sunday is guaranteed to become the subject of water cooler discussion the following Monday. This is exactly what happened to Groupon, but it wasn’t a good thing.

The company ran ads featuring famous celebrities, among them actor Timothy Hutton. His spot began with him discussing human rights abuses in Tibet, and then raving about the deals Groupon offered on fish curry at Himalayan restaurants. Scores of viewers were offended at what they felt was the trivialization of an important cause, and the backlash to the ads was severe. The company pulled the ad four days later.

Below you can see a comment criticising the ad on YouTube.

Holiday Inn

In the 1990s, the Holiday Inn hotel chain decided to get with the times and undergo a billion dollar renovation. When it was finished, they chose the 1997 Super Bowl as the venue in which to brag about it. They ran a commercial that depicted two classmates at a high school reunion. One tries to place the name of the beautiful woman standing before him and after a few guesses, he figures it out — the vision of beauty before him used to be named Bob.

The voiceover then goes on to reason that since the thousands of dollars that “Bob” had spent had been such a success, wouldn’t the same hold true for a billion-dollar hotel chain renovation? As it turned out, the answer was no. Not only did the campaign fail to renew interest in the chain, it was deemed offensive by LGBT groups, who boycotted the hotel.

Snickers

Mr. T terrorizes a speed walker with effeminate tendencies by shooting Snickers bars at him through a Gatling gun. In the process, he “pities the fool” and criticizes him for his choice of exercise. Not surprisingly, LGBT support groups decried the message Snickers was sending to people about how it’s okay to discriminate against someone based on mannerisms. It can be argued that this marketing effort ceased to be effective when displayed an underlaying message that is so blatantly overpowering that you lose sight of the products.

Lessons Learned:

-Make sure your advert does not portray something that is not.

– If outrageous, make sure to be sensible especially when regards a minority group such as LGBT.

– Consider culture differences.

– Consider the consumer interest when putting the video on social network.

– Audience interaction will help to engage and communicate the message especially if it is a funny prank (LG Elevator) or interestingly dramatic (TNT stunt).

– A campaign which the viewer can relate to or takes on an emotional journey (Penguin ad), is likely to be memorable and shared to others. 

References

Frier, S (2015) ‘FaceBook’s New Year Resolution: More Video Ads in News Feed’. Available at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-07/facebook-s-new-year-resolution-more-video-ads-in-news-feed

Long, C. (2014) Viral Marketing For Dedicated Customers’ Information Systems. Vol 46 page 1-23. Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/science/article/pii/S0306437914000751

 Kuchler & Hannah (2013) FaceBook launches autoplay video ads: MEDIA Financial Times London. Available at: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/docview/1478035244?OpenUrlRefId=info:xri/sid:summon

Phelps J,  et al (2004) Viral Marketing or Eletronic word of mouth advertsing: Examine consumer responses and motivation to pass along email. Journal of advertising research 44(4) pp.333.348

 Schawbel, D (2013). Jonah Berger: How to make your marketing Campaign Go Viral. Forbes