Babies have been used in advertising for decades to sell all sorts of unrelated products, from E*TRADE's online brokerage tools, to Motrin's pain medicine, to Ally McBeal. In recent years, babies have broken into online video. Their latest conquest is bottled water, via Evian and its Live Young campaign. The campaign features animated babies moonwalking, breakdancing, and roller skating through the wonders of 3D computer graphics.
Evian's Roller Babies
As we have previously reported, the performance of the campaign has been off the charts. It shattered all view count records on last week's Ad Age Viral Video Chart with a staggering 13.8 million views -- more than twice the amount of all the other campaigns on the chart combined. It's already the most-viewed viral video ad campaign of the year and was launched just last month. Impressive.
These results show that the campaign has unquestionably struck a chord with online video audiences. And, though "content is king," the strategy for launching the campaign seems to have contributed to the results. Baby Moonwalk came out in early June, followed by Baby Breakdance 10 days later, and then Roller Babies in early July, when the campaign really started to take off.
Though Roller Babies has attracted the majority of the views and buzz, every other creative asset for the campaign has amassed at least 1 million views, including "making of" videos. Evian even published an interview with the babies yesterday, which, if trending tells us anything, has the potential to reach 1 million views. The addition of these new assets seems to have driven sustained and increased viewership and interest in the campaign.
The success of this campaign speaks to the importance of pre-launch campaign planning followed by sustained marketing support. 'Launching hard' with lovable content and continually refreshing it with new creative assets seem to be key ingredients for successful viral video ad campaigns. Of course, talented babies help too.
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The data used in this post was collected from our Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing video repository of analytic data on 100+ million Internet videos from 150+ video-sharing destinations.
For more from James O'Connor, follow him on Twitter @jamesIII.