Getting your video advert to “go viral” is the holy grail of video marketers. After all, why pay for ad space when your target audience will do the selling for you?
To generate these high-impact user-initiated views, brands are creating more content than ever before, mainly with the goal of generating “earned media”. Earned media (or free media) refers to favourable publicity gained through promotional efforts other than advertising (as opposed to paid media, which refers to publicity gained through advertising).
Viral video adverts come and go each week, but there are a few that really stand the test of time. Months later they are still doing the rounds and steadily clocking up more and more views.
These are the videos that have unlocked the secrets of the Holy Grail.
And they can be found in AdAge Digital Magazine’s (viral-video) Top 10 Viral Ads of All Time.
These are ads audiences actually chose to watch. According to AdAge they don’t include pre-roll or auto-play ads that interrupt viewing.
“Creative plays a significant role in the success of each campaign, but paid media has become a critical factor in driving campaigns to what we call their “earned media threshold,” a campaign’s tipping point for generating earned media. This threshold varies depending on creative quality – the better the creative, the lower the threshold.” says Brian Shin of AdAgeDigital.
Source:image from Adage
The campaigns in their Top 10 list have each hit their earned media threshold and are now running on cruise control.
To determine who made the list, AdAge studied thousands of social video campaigns across the web. Each was measured on a “True Reach” basis, which includes the original clips the brands and agencies uploaded as well as the clips audiences copied, mixed, mashed, spoofed and reposted across the web.
So far only two campaigns have ever crossed the 100 million view barrier, Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?” and Evian’s “Live Young.”
Think for a second about the significance of an ad being chosen more than 100 million times.
And these two campaigns just keep on going. Blendtec gets over 700,000 views each week on average, while Evian swallows more than 1.1 million.
It’s true, newer campaigns may be more explosive, but they also fade more quickly.
Here are AdAge Digital’s Top 10 Viral Ads of All Time:
1. Blendtec / Will it Blend / 173,200,818 views (Total all videos) – Here is one of our favourites:
2. Evian / Live Young / 158,185,452 views
3. Old Spice / Responses / 80,592,555 views
4. Volkswagen / The Force / 58,537,201 views
5. DC Shoes / DC x Ken Block’s Gymkhana Project / 57,868,629 views
6. Microsoft / Xbox Project / 53,871,614 views
7. Pepsi / Gladiator / 52,931,154 views
8. Old Spice / Odor Blocker / 52,465,193 views
9. Old Spice / The Man Your Man Could Smell Like / 51,048,338 views
10. Doritos / Crash The Super Bowl / 47,267,865
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