Viral Advertising

Viral Advertising

What is Viral Advertising?

It is a strategy by which a marketer creates a campaign focused around the goal of causing viewers of that promotion to spontaneously spread it by sending it to friends. Email was the original viral marketing strategy because the media encourages forwarding messages to more people.

Red Bull Space Jump – October 2012

Breaking three world records, Felix Baumgartner completed the iconic space jump for Red Bull in October 2012. The Mission Highlights video alone on Red Bull’s channel has over 37.4M views.

Telekinetic Coffee Shop Surprise – October 2013

To promote the movie Carrie, a New York coffee shop was transformed for a hidden camera stunt to capture shoppers’ reactions to telekinesis. The official video has had nearly 60M YouTube views to date.

LG Elevator Prank – October 2012

Promoting how ‘lifelike’ its new IPS monitors, LG pulled this brilliant stunt replacing an elevator floor with the monitors to make it look like the floor was falling away while unsuspecting people were in the lift to hilarious reactions. The original video has over 22.9M YouTube videos and LG have since filmed other brilliant pranks including the meteor one also below.

Evian baby&me – April 2013

Evian’s babies campaign is a common favourite amongst marketers and the public alike, proven by the fact this video has over 96M views! A multi-faceted campaign including an app for users to create their own baby image, this was a huge success.

Why use Viral Advertising?

Viral marketing is often used in conjunction with other methods of marketing, such as in the case of the Blair Witch Project. The viral aspect of the campaign generated buzz about the story long before the release of commercials, trailers, posters, and other forms of traditional marketing. This caused many people to already talk about the movie before it was officially announced to the public.

Viral Ads

Viral Advertising

Viral marketing is a business strategy that uses existing social networks to promote a product. Its name refers to how consumers spread information about a product with other people in their social networks, much in the same way that a virus spreads from one person to another. Viral marketing is useful as a stand-alone marketing tool or as a part of a larger campaign that uses multiple kinds of marketing. It is especially attractive to smaller businesses or companies because viral marketing can be a cheaper alternative to traditional marketing efforts.

Dove Real Beauty Sketches

What may go down as the viral campaign of 2013, Dove once again challenged our perceptions of beauty. With Dove Real Beauty Sketches, the brand invited a group of

women to sit down with a sketch artist and describe themselves to him. The brand then asked strangers to describe the same women. The artist then showed the pictures side by side showing the negative perception many women have about their own looks. The brand wasn’t pushing a specific product. It was making a statement and a powerful one at that. What I most love about this campaign is that it shows if you make a fantastic piece of content, people will do the viral marketing for you. If there’s one thing you can take away from reading this blog post, please let it be that. 

Google Android: "Friends Furever"
Android's "Friends Furever" video is simple, cute, totally curated and was the most shared video ad of 2015. While the curation probably took a while, there wasn't much original content creation going on here, it's really just a series of clips of unlikely animals palling around together. I mean, who doesn't want to see a parrot feeding spaghetti to a husky? Or a monkey climbing onto a horse's back? And yet, the video was shared more than 6.4 million times, according to video ad tech company Unruly.

Reebok: "25,915 Days"
The average human lives for 25,915 days and Reebok wants us to use those days to continuously honor and push our bodies to their physical limits. Their video promoting the #HonorYourDays campaign doesn't contain any spoken words, but the message is powerful: Make the most of the days you have by, as they put it, "honoring the body you've been given." The video follows one woman's relationship with running in reverse, from her running the Reebok-sponsored Spartan Race as a middle-aged woman, to running track in high school, all the way back to the day she was born. It's a great way for Reebok to communicate their brand mission of changing how people perceive and experience fitness at every age and of letting customers know they'll be there to cover their athletic gear needs throughout their lives.

Evian
Evian found great success with its Roller Babies campaign, which is the most-viewed viral advertisement of all time. The babies perform their routine after a title card indicates that drinking Evian water would make you feel as young and energetic as those babies. People are amused by the roller-skating babies but do not necessarily connect that imagery to the Evian brand. It is possible that the target audience for a video of animated babies is not the same demographic of people who would ever by Evian water under any circumstances. The footage of the babies was no more relevant to Evian than it would have been to any brand.

Marks & Spencer: Mrs Claus

In "Christmas with love from Mrs Claus", this female protagonist is revealed as the true mastermind behind the magic of Christmas. After waving goodbye to her husband as he ventures into the snow to deliver presents around the world, Mrs Claus embarks on a special project, helping six year-old Jake send his sister a thoughtful present. Rather than foregrounding the brand’s products as in previous years the focus is shifting towards personal storytelling. While this formula is in no way new, take John Lewis’ various tear-jerker Christmas spots as examples, Marks and Spencer certainly succeeds in telling a story far less told.

Viral Adverts

Viral Advertising refers to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networking services and other technologies to try to increase in brand awareness. Viral marketing may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, eBooks, brandable software, images, text messages, email messages, or web pages. The emergence of "viral marketing", as an approach to advertisement, has been tied to the popularization of the notion that ideas spread like viruses. The field that developed around this notion, memetics, peaked in popularity in the 1990s. Among the first to write about viral marketing on the Internet was the media critic Doug Rushkoff. The assumption is that if such an advertisement reaches a "susceptible" user, that user becomes "infected" (i.e., accepts the idea) and shares the idea with others "infecting them". As long as each infected user shares the idea with more than one susceptible user on average the number of infected users grows according to an exponential curve.

Evian Babies
Evian set the babies loose on the world in 1998, 15 years later, the new version of the classic ad is working better than ever thanks to the viral potential of the Internet, as over 117 million views prove.

Three UK #DancePonyDance
Three’s advert featuring a moonwalking pony became an instant viral hit amassing a whopping 9.7M YouTube views to date. Three also created the PonyMixer which allowed users to create their own version of the Ad however this has since been removed.

John Lewis - #BusterTheBoxer
John Lewis' festive ad featuring trampolining animals is 2016'S most-shared ad on social media, despite launching in November, it currently has a massive 1,949,387 shares.

Viral Marketing - Films

Viral marketing, intentional or incidental, permits the opportunity for invested film fans to feel that very thing. If the right information finds the right pathway to the right people, a separate film experience can be built, one that’s more abstract and yet more alive, more engaging, involved, and more suitable to an exclusive experience for the most committed and obsessive movie fans.

 

Production Logo

 

Here is our finished production logo. We used the internet to research current film production logos for inspiration and we all liked the Dreamworks logo. This gave us the idea of our production company being called 'Moonlight Pictures'. We then use google to find a suitable image of the moon which we manipulated to create our own. We used Da Font to find a suitable style to add text to the logo. Below is a step by step guide into how we made our production logo. 

1) We used Adobe Photoshop CC 2015 to create our production logo. First we created a background layer to act as a canvas for our logo

2) We used google to find a image of the moon that we believed was suitable for the main body of the production logo. We copied and pasted the image into Photoshop as a new layer.

3) We then used the 'filter gallery' feature within Photoshop to change the appearance of the image and make it our own. We chose the 'cutout' effect within the feature and changed the simplicity and fidelity of the effect. 






4) We used Da Font to search for a style that we thought suited our production company and was relevant to our film. 




 

5) We then added the text on another layer, to the image and placed it within the moon.






6) We then duplicated the text layer and inverted the text so that it became a mirror image. We placed the text in the rippling water to act as a reflection.








7) Finally we used the 'filter' feature on the text to distort the text. We used the 'ripple' effect to make the text blend in with the water.

Rough Cut Questionnaire Analysis

Rough Cut Questionnaire Analysis

From our questionnaire we can infer that the majority of people we asked thought that the genre of our film was a supernatural thriller. This is what we expected because in our film, there is a greater presence which brings supernatural into thriller.

From our questionnaire we can see that 5 out of 10 people said that our film should be given the certificate of a 12A. We expected this as our film doesn't show any death and meets the guidelines of a 12A film by the BBFC.



Most of the people who completed our questionnaire expected to see our film online. This is the outcome we wanted as because our film is a short film, allowing it to be watched online would give it more chance of recognition.

When people were asked what they liked about our film, 4 people answered the plot and storyline. This is good because this is the main focus for our film, and the fact that our audience like it means they should enjoying watching it when it's complete.



From our questionnaire results we can see that although people said that they liked the storyline, 6 people told us that they didn't understand the storyline. This is a worry because we need our audience to understand the storyline in order for them to enjoy the film. We need to re- think how we are going to make the storyline understandable from the audience's point of view.

Everyone who participated in the questionnaire answered yes in response to been asked whether the music suited the film. This is the response we expected from the people asked because we chose music carefully, ensuring it suits the particular scene it is working with.

 

 

The final question was whether there should be any improvements with our film. 50% of the people we asked suggested that we add more scene to improve our film, with 2 people inferring that we should develop our characters more. This is beneficial feedback and we will take this on board.

 

From the findings of this question we have decided to add a scene in introducing Jake to the audience more. This will develop his character and help the audience understand why he isn't in the main scene. We are also going to add a scene at the beginning of our film, showing Melissa purchasing the Ouija Board so the audience knows how the main event came about.  

Presence rough Cut

Location Changes

Firstly we intended to use Caitlyn's house for our main scene of the group of friends using the Ouija board to communicate with spirits. After further planning had taken place we came to the conclusion that a more sinister location would be more relevant to the film such as an abandoned building with dark chiaroscuro lighting to create a foreboding atmosphere rather than a normal house. We all agreed that it would also be better to film in an abandoned building due to the nature of the film, ensuring no damage was done to Caitlyn's house.

Also we decided to use college as the location for our first scene rather than a house because it clearly establishes that the character's occupation of students and highlights that they're students.We believed that the college would be a better location as our target audience can relate to the building and understand the characters perception.