Visible Measures Blog

One For The Money sees 2 million social video views this week and lands in second place on the Top 10 Film Trailers Chart. The increase in views is typical as the studio pumps last-minute promotions as it prepares to release. Katherine Heigl stars in the action comedy, where she learns the ropes as a recovery agent at a bail bonding company. In 2010, Katherine Heigl starred (with Ashton Kutcher) in another action comedy, Killers. Compared to Killers, One For the Money is outperforming Killers nearly 500%, a good sign for box office earnings. At the week of release, Killers garnered under 400,000 views. It went on to rake in $15 million at the box office at opening weekend.

Three films released last weekend: Underworld: Awakening, Red Tails, and Haywire, which grabbed 2.3 million, 740,000+ and 506,000+ social video views, respectively. Last weekend's box office results follow the same pattern: Underworld topped the box office with $25 million, Red Tails at second with $18.7 million and Haywire cashed in $8 million at sixth place. 

The Most-Watched Film Trailers of the Week 

Rank	Last Week's Rank	Film Title	Distributor	Genre	True Reach*	Weeks Until Release	% Change in Views**	Watch
1	1	Underworld: Awakening	Sony	Action, Fantasy, Horror	2,235,009	-1	-61%
2	3	One For The Money	Lionsgate	Comedy, Crime, Action	2,091,424	0	44%
3	2	Chronicle	Fox	Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller	1,231,921	1	-39%
4	4	The Vow	Sony	Drama, Romance	1,054,759	2	0%
5	6	Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance	Sony	Action, Fantasy, Thriller	941,461	3	10%
6	9	Red Tails	20th Century Fox	Action, Adventure, Drama	741,372	-1	11%
7	8	Project X	Warner Bros.	Comedy	638,678	5	-6%
8	Back on Chart	Haywire	Relativity Media, Paramount	Action, Thriller	506,017	-1	Back on Chart
9	7	The Woman In Black	Alliance Films	Drama, Horror, Thriller	462,519	1	-35%
10	NEW	John Carter	Walt Disney Pictures	Action, Adventure, Fantasy	356,688	6	NEW

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Is the future of the sitcom a syndicated viral webisode series broken into three seven-minute chunks weekly? Alloy and a handful of advertisers are giving it a try, anyway.

"Dating Rules from My Future Self" makes its first appearance on the viral video chart (nearly a million views last week), and it differs from the usual entries in being more or less a webisode version of a romantic-comedy-style TV sitcom with multiple sponsors, albeit with plenty of product integration.

From Alloy, producer of CW's "Gossip Girl," it features actress Shiri Appleby of "Roswell" and "Life Unexpected" fame, in three seven- or eight-minute webisodes a week -- pretty much like a sitcom sans commercial pods, or commercials. Each segment launches with a "presented by" sequence, with Revlon, Ford, KaoBrands' Biore and Energizer Holdings' Schick among the sponsors, who also have their products featured at various times throughout the series.

The concept: Ms. Appleby plays a young woman who gets text messages from her future self warning her of relationship dangers, such as the fact that her fiance is actually a douche. Thanks to some well-timed advice during wedding planning, sponsored by Revlon, she discovers this before it's too late.

This brings to mind another concept for a web series, "Marketing Advice from My Future Self," in which time-shifted brand managers text the sponsors to let them know if they're on the right track. But they may just have to wait for the marketing-mix models.

Rank	Last Week's Rank	Brand	Campaign	Agency	Current Week's Views*	% Change in Views**	Watch
1	NEW	Volkswagen	The Bark Side	Deutsch Los Angeles	7,139,665	NEW
2	NEW	Icon	Motorcycle vs. Car Drift Battle 2	NA	3,786,225	NEW
3	Back on Chart	Megaupload	Megaupload Song	NA	2,125,926	Back on Chart
4	2	Old Spice	Smell is Power	Wieden + Kennedy Portland	999,431	-37%
5	7	Google	Chromebook	BBH New York;Google Creative Lab	990,237	+6%
6	NEW	Biore, Ford, Revlon, Schick	Dating Rules From My Future Self	NA	963,369	NEW
7	NEW	Nike	Kobesystem	Wieden + Kennedy Portland	907,549	NEW
8	5	Evian	Live Young	BETC Euro RSCG	848,200	-15%
9	8	Apple	Introducing iPhone 4S	TBWA\Media Arts Lab	811,279	-12%
10	4	YouTube,Lenovo	Spacelab: What Will You Do?	NA	802,715	-21%

 

Jack Neff is a reporter at Advertising Age. You can find the original article here. 

*Indicates percent change in views compared with the same period the week before.

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People chose to watch ads over 745 million times in Q4 2011, an increase of more than 25% since last quarter, and up more than 35% over Q4 2010. 745+ million views is just south of Q1's numbers, impressive considering that Q1 is when Super Bowl ads are released. New campaigns from Apple, YouTube and Lenovo, and Rick Perry are among the top ads that consumers watched in Q4, and Apple and Google are among the most-viewed brands. And, the holiday season helped bump Cell Phones into the top 5 verticals of the quarter. 

In our Q4 2011 social video advertising report, we take a look at the top five most-watched campaigns, brands, and industries. Check out the quarterly industry growth: 

The data provided in this report is based on Visible Measures' Share of Choice™ Q4 2011 reporting, a competitive analysis of brand performance in choice-based video advertising. Share of Choice reveals the brands consumers choose to watch most in an industry. All campaigns in this report are measured on a True Reach™ basis, which combines the performance of brand-driven and audience-driven video clips across the Web. All views in this report are user-initiated, where a real person needs to press the “play” button to watch an ad.

You can read the complete Q4 2011 social video advertising report here.

After much speculation and anticipation, the 2012 Academy Award nominations were announced yesterday. Of the nine best picture nominees, Hugo leads the pack with eleven nominations, and The Artist following closely behind with ten. Moneyball and War Horse both grab six nods. The Descendants nabs five nominations, while The Help and Midnight in Paris grab four each. Rounding out the prestigious category are The Tree of Life, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

We’ll have to wait until February 26 to find out which film will bring home the Oscar, but we can look at which film has received the most buzz in social video today. By looking at social video views, we can guage how much anticipation each film generated before it hit the silver screen. The graph below shows how many views each film grabbed at the week of its release.  

The Results

All the best picture nominees had a significant presence in social video, but the leader of the pack is clear. The Tree of Life takes the top spot with 4.8+ million views at the week of release, over 1 million more than the runner-up, Moneyball, with 3.7 million views. (Both feature Brad Pitt.) The Help, adapted by the book of the same name, grabs third with 2.8 million views, while Steven Spielberg’s War Horse nips on its heels with 2.7 million views.

Another film adapted from a popular book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, falls behind War Horse with nearly 2 million views at its week of release. Martin Scorsese’s family-friendly Hugo comes in next with 1.5 million views. The Descendants edges out The Artist with over 1 million views, while The Artist garnered 970,000+. Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris rounds out the best picture category in social video with 650,000+ views.

Social Video and the Box Office

Box office results typically follow the same pattern as social video, which makes sense – people watch videos online before deciding which film to watch in theaters. For this year's best picture category, it's no different. With the exception of The Tree of Life, the top four highest-grossing films (domestic opening weekend), are in the top five most-viewed films in social video.

The Oscar Effect in Social Video

In 2010, we reported that social video views of best picture winner, Hurt Locker, rocketed 750% after it won the prize. On average, the nominees saw a 50% bump in social video views. Last year, The King’s Speech claimed the sought-after statue, and the day after the biopic won the award, social video views increased over 70%.  

Which nominee is your favorite? Let us know in the comments section below!

This article was published in MediaPost's Video Insider.

It’s crunch time for Super Bowl 2012 advertisers. Over the next few weeks they’ll be meeting to tweak, massage, and optimize their non-trivial marketing investment coming up on Feb. 5. All of their months of planning, strategizing, and ideating, not to mention the millions of dollars spent on media and creative to capture the attention of 100+ million people, all come down to a very quick 30 to 60 seconds.

The sad truth is that advertisers who plan to battle only for those 30 to 60 seconds on Feb. 5 have already lost the war. Beyond the 100+ million people who watch the big game and the ads that Sunday night, there are around half a billion user-initiated social video views up for grabs before the opening kickoff and after the final whistle. Performance-savvy advertisers and their agency partners who have time-shifted the viewing behaviors of their target audiences around the Super Bowl in the past have developed comprehensive plans before game day. And they’ve reaped huge rewards.

But it’s not too late for advertisers to extract incremental reach and frequency from their Super Bowl budgets through online exposure. By making minor creative adjustments, reallocating online media weight, and familiarizing themselves with relevant benchmarks, advertisers can be sure to maximize campaign visibility for the big game.

Here's a plan:

Leverage supplemental creative assets. The main creative for the Super Bowl campaigns almost always drives the majority of the views -- but by leveraging only one creative, advertisers leave millions of views on the table. Campaigns with multiple creative executions generally drive significant viewership from their secondary and tertiary assets. Even the cutting-room floor can be a gold mine for millions of views; creative agencies burn through many creative concepts and footage before finalizing the spot and getting approval from the advertiser. When audiences like an ad, they want more, and salvaging the remains from the cutout bin can be a good source of more content. A great example for the potential of creative scraps comes from the Visible Measures 2011 Super Bowl Report, which shows that Volkswagen was able to drive over 3 million views from supplement creative assets, including behind-the-scenes clips and bloopers.

Front-load paid social spend. You can greatly amplify the overall effect of your online and offline components by reallocating media spend on video distribution before and after the big game. Pre-game spend builds up critical mass and buzz, which creates anticipation for your 30 to 60 seconds in front of 100+ million people. Post-game spend extends engagement with your brand online and keeps the good times rolling. But be diligent when finding a distribution partner -- look for a strong serving infrastructure that can optimize media with real- time creative rotation based on performance data instead of a media broker who is making commissions off trading inventory.

Know your benchmarks. Just like the teams on the field, your team needs to work towards common objectives, aligning you and your agency partners around the best-practice benchmarks and key performance metrics for your industry. There's at least three years of social video Super Bowl data available, which helps to baseline social reach and engagement for past Super Bowl campaigns for your brand and even competitive campaigns in your vertical. This data will keep you from second-guessing your campaign performance.

Read the original article here.

A few days before Super Bowl 2011, Volkswagen took the world by storm with their cute Darth Vader. By "leaking" the spot in social video, VW was able to generate over 14 million views before kickoff. After the big game, the campaign exploded -- it has over 65 million social video views to date, and is one of the most-watched social video campaigns of all time.

Well, VW's done it again for Super Bowl 2012. But, it's being more aggressive this time around. We're just under two weeks out from Super Bowl 2012 and the das auto brand has already launched a teaser for the big game.

The teaser is called The Bark Side and stays in the same creative realm as The Force, combining cuteness with the dark side.

The Bark Side has already generated over 7 million views. There are over 70 clips for the campaign to date as well as over 5,000 comments.

By comparison, The Force had over 14 million views at the same point in its campaign (five days after launch) and well over 130 clips.

We'll have to wait and see if The Bark Side can overtake The Force in time. But it's off to an exceptional start. And, The Bark Side is just the teaser for the main spot, so there's much more to come.

Which Volkswagen ad do you like more? Which ad do you think will win? Let us know in the comments section below!

Topping 5.7 million views in social video this week, Underworld: Awakening will try to take over theaters this weekend. The fourth installment of the Underworld franchise sees a 27% increase in views from last week, and takes the top spot on the Top 10 Online Film Trailers Chart. The film has nearly 650 clips scattered across the Web. Last week, Sony debuted several new TV spots and film clips, helping ramp promotion and encourage social video viewership before the film releases this weekend. Additionally, it appears that heavy promotion drove a few trailers and TV spots, increasing viewership.  

Battling Underworld in theaters this weekend is George Lucas' wartime action flick, Red Tails. Starring Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr, the film details the story of the Tuskegee airmen during World War II. For its release, the film jumped to 665,000+ views in social video, an increase of 26%. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the demographics for social video Red Tails viewers is more than 90% male.

What film do you plan on watching this weekend? Have you watched the trailers in social video? Let us know in the comments section below!  

The Top 10 Most-Watched Film Trailers of the Week

Rank	Last Week's Rank	Film Title	Distributor	Genre	True Reach*	Weeks Until Release	% Change in Views**	Watch
1	2	Underworld: Awakening	Sony	Action, Fantasy, Horror	5,756,498	0	27%
2	1	Chronicle	Fox	Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller	2,012,369	2	-82%
3	Back on Chart	One For The Money	Lionsgate	Comedy, Crime, Action	1,450,355	1	Back on Chart
4	6	The Vow	Sony	Drama, Romance	1,056,972	3	17%
5	8	Contraband	Universal	Crime, Thriller	899,773	-1	27%
6	4	Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance	Sony	Action, Fantasy, Thriller	858,761	4	-19%
7	7	The Woman In Black	Alliance Films	Drama, Horror, Thriller	708,077	2	-1%
8	NEW	Project X	Warner Bros.	Comedy	682,567	6	NEW
9	9	Red Tails	20th Century Fox	Action, Adventure, Drama	667,436	0	26%
10	NEW	Joyful Noise	Warner Bros.	Comedy, Music	508,244	-1	NEW

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Superthin OLED TVs were the rage at last week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. LG and agency Y&R Amsterdam borrowed the look of security camera video to humorously drive the key point home: They're really thin. The video, which has no sound or dialogue, found 2.3 million views last week.

LG actually has two spots on the chart, the second for a vacuum with nearly a million views. Two different products, and two very different approaches to humor. My guess is the second is enjoying some SEO benefits due to its title: "Super Model Photography Trick."

Rank	Last Week's Rank	Brand	Campaign	Agency	Current Week's Views*	% Change in Views**	Watch
1	NEW	LG	Smart Thief	Y&R Amsterdam	2,329,108	NEW
2	NEW	Old Spice	Blown Mind	Wieden + Kennedy Portland	1,583,195	NEW
3	2	Doritos	Crash the Superbowl 2012	Goodby Silverstein & Partners	1,481,837	-14%
4	Back on Chart	YouTube, Lenovo	Spacelab: What Will You Do?	NA	1,018,112	Back on Chart
5	4	Evian	Live Young	BETC Euro RSCG	996,521	2%
6	NEW	LG	Super Model Photography Trick	George Patterson Y&R Sydney	988,790	NEW
7	Back on Chart	Google	Chromebook	BBH New York;Google Creative Lab	934,699	Back on Chart
8	3	Apple	Introducing iPhone 4S	TBWA\Media Arts Lab	926,185	-21%
9	7	Blendtec	Will it Blend?	In-House	669,416	-18%
10	10	Kia	Share Some Soul	David&Goliath Los Angeles	654,041	-8%

 

Michael Learmonth is a reporter at Advertising Age. You can find the original article here. 

*Indicates percent change in views compared with the same period the week before.

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Last week, we reported that Contraband had an edge over Man on a Ledge in social video. However, tides have turned this week, and Contraband falls seven spots this week to eighth place with 709,000+ views. Man on a Ledge, on the other hand, sees a 50%+ increase in views, reaching over 1 million views. Man on a Ledge may have Contraband beat this week, but Contraband has over 11 million cumulative views compared to Man on a Ledge's 2.4+ million.

Meanwhile, The Iron Lady also releases nationwide this weekend, as it debuts on the chart at tenth place with 432,000+ views. The biopic stars Meryl Streep as former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in her rise to power. 

Additionally, it appears that Fox studios has stepped up global promotional efforts, including social video, as Chronicle tops the chart with 11 million views. With three weeks left until release, Fox has launched five trailers and several TV spots.

Which film will you watch this weekend? Let us know in the comments box below!

The Top 10 Most-Watched Film Trailers of the Week

Rank	Last Week's Rank	Film Title	Distributor	Genre	True Reach*	Weeks Until Release	% Change in Views**	Watch
1	8	Chronicle	Fox	Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller	10,955,867	3	3260%
2	5	Underworld: Awakening	Sony	Action, Fantasy, Horror	4,545,315	1	650%
3	7	The Grey	Open Road Films	Action, Drama, Thriller	1,173,085	2	219%
4	3	Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance	Sony	Action, Fantasy, Thriller	1,055,016	5	53%
5	4	Man on a Ledge	Summit	Thriller	1,032,236	0	53%
6	6	The Vow	Sony	Drama, Romance	905,356	4	76%
7	NEW	The Woman In Black	Alliance Films	Drama, Horror, Thriller	712,415	3	NEW
8	1	Contraband	Universal	Crime, Thriller	709,167	0	-63%
9	Back on Chart	Red Tails	20th Century Fox	Action, Adventure, Drama	530,786	1	Back on Chart
10	NEW	The Iron Lady	The Weinstein Company	Drama, Biography	432,200	0	NEW

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The Super Bowl is already starting to have its way with the Viral Video Chart.

Extravaganzas from heavy-hitting creative shops haven't shown up yet, although those will come soon enough as marketers try to use free impressions on YouTube to make their Super Bowl investments go further. But Doritos' fifth "Crash The Super Bowl" contest surged to the top of the chart after the company posted the finalists last week, helping the collective submissions generate 1.7 million views. This year's effort elicited more than 6,100 entries from filmmakers vying for a chance to have their work featured alongside creative by veteran hit-makers The Lonely Island during the Super Bowl -- and to win $1 million if viewers vote that they prefer the amateur's take.

Meanwhile, Volkswagen is cashing in again on the viral gold it struck last year with "The Force," which depicts a little boy trying to channel Darth Vader's powers within the confines of his suburban home. The effort collected the fifth-most amount of views this week, presumably getting significant viral reactivation from year-end roundup stories linking to the most viral spots of 2011. "The Force" debuted online last year, racked up 10 million views before it was ever shown on TV, and became the most-viewed Super Bowl ad on the web.

Aggressive paid placement prior to the game paid off in the end for Volkswagen, and Kantar Video estimated last February that the spot was worth $538,470 in free media when benchmarked against the roughly $3 million cost of a 30-second Super Bowl commercial. (That's just what the impressions would cost to reach those additional people, and doesn't try to account for the PR value from the exposure and positive press coverage.)

Evian (No. 4) and Blendtec (No. 7) also seem to be benefiting from viral reactivation spurred by year-in-review stories. Their campaigns had made the chart for 121 and 52 weeks, respectively, but are returning now after an absence.

Rank	Last Week's Rank	Brand	Campaign	Agency	Current Week's Views*	% Change in Views**	Watch
1	NEW	Doritos	Crash the Superbowl 2012	NA	1,728,998	NEW
2	NEW	Samsung,Google	Galaxy Nexus Calling All	Mullen Boston	1,353,868	NEW
3	9	Apple	Introducing iPhone 4S	TBWA\Media Arts Lab	1,177,803	-2%
4	Back on Chart	Evian	Live Young	BETC Euro RSCG	974,088	Back on Chart
5	Back on Chart	Volkswagen	The Force	Deutsch Los Angeles	867,533	Back on Chart
6	Back on Chart	Nokia	The Amazing Everyday	Inferno Group	821,858	Back on Chart
7	Back on Chart	Blendtec	Will it Blend?	In-House	817,495	Back on Chart
8	Back on Chart	Izod,Hot Wheels	Fearless at the 500	Mistress	793,977	Back on Chart
9	NEW	Norton	Dare You To Find A Cuter Kid	Leo Burnett Chicago	733,734	NEW
10	Back on Chart	Kia	Share Some Soul	David&Goliath Los Angeles	711,649	Back on Chart