In an episode that aired November 30, The Simpsons brought their unique brand of cultural commentary to bear on technology icon Apple, when the show's Springfield Mall sprouted a “Mapple” Store. The episode featured everything you’d expect from a Simpson’s parody – "MyPods," "MyPhones," a "Brainiac Bar" – even Steve Mobs.
According to this post at MediaWeek, the show brought in 8.0 million TV viewers and coincidentally features commercials for both the new MacBook and iPhone (though Apple representatives later denied any previous knowledge of the faux-brand integration into the plot).
Scenes from the show were uploaded online and, unsurprisingly, started burning up the blogosphere. This created a much-desired social video spiral, with commentary appearing on an ever-increasing list of blogs while the Simpsons/Mapple clips bounced from site-to-site. Once again, we couldn't resist dipping in to our Viral Reach Database to measure the episode’s online viewership.
We discovered more than 30 unique video placements related to the episode and that these clips have so far generated more than 1.9 million views. And while some viewers undoubtedly watched the clips more than once, these figures compare rather favorably with the episode's reported TV audience share numbers.
Assuming that 1 in 5 views were repeat viewers, that’s around a 20% pickup (!!) in views for one of the longest running shows on television – all from viral video! And even though Apple didn’t know about the episode, they obviously received a significant amount of attention from it – the term “Apple” was the second-most commented term for Mapple clips, right behind “Simpsons.”
One interesting question that follows is whether or not Apple could have gotten even more bang for its buck ("free" views, in this case) with these Mapple clips. They happened to run advertising during the episode, specifically the MacBook "Green" commercial.
However, we found little connection between the viral video consumption trends of this ad and the Simpsons Mapple clips, as the MacBook Green commercial had accumulated just over 230,000 views since its November 24 premiere. In our previous research, namely for Wario Land: Shake It and Guitar Hero: World Tour, we found evidence of what we have termed "viral activation" – when interest in a new video causes people to watch other related videos.
Perhaps a more explicit, more "official" Apple tie-in with the Mapple spoof would have driven a spike in MacBook Green ad views. Or perhaps the brand association was already clear enough, and doing anything further would have been negatively perceived by the online viewing audience. It's tough to second guess a company with marketing track record like Apple, but what do you think? Is this an opportunity missed or evidence of Apple's delicate viral video marketing touch?
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The data used in this post was collected from Visible Measure's Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing video repository of analytic data on 100+ million Internet videos from 150+ video-sharing destinations.