Today's brands must perform a delicate balancing act between adopting the creative 'norms' of the viral video industry while not coming off as disingenuous. What one viewer might consider acceptably clever marketing, another might consider intentionally deceptive. But the line between what is acceptable and what isn't isn't always clear.
We here at Visible Measures try not to wade into debating the creative merits of any particular video clip -- that is, to loosely quote our President-elect, above our pay grade. However, we couldn't resist measuring how the online video audience would respond to the various approaches of revealing (or not revealing) the origins of viral video campaigns. So we tapped our Viral Reach Database to compare the performance of two campaigns from both sides of the coin: Activision's Bike Hero (for Guitar Hero World Tour) and EA Sports' Tiger Woods Jesus Shot (for Tigers Woods 09).
Bike Hero is an elaborately produced spin-off of the game play experience of Guitar Hero. As you can see from the clip below, the video is shot in a shaky first-person perspective and follows a bike-rider through streets and parking lots lined with colored dots, physically recreating Guitar Hero's virtual environment.
Bike Hero
While the production style of this clip gives it a decidedly user-generated feel, the sheer magnitude and complexity of the set calls the video’s authenticity into question. Soon after the posting, YouTube user “Madflux” was revealed as Droga5, one of Activision's advertising agencies. What has followed includes some pointed blogosphere dialogue, with some viewers applauding the firm's over-the-top creatively while others declaring it had somehow 'crossed-the-line' into inauthenticity.
In comparison, EA Sports took an unabashedly 'above-board' approach when issuing a viral video response to the YouTube user Levinator25, who had pointed out a glitch in the game that allowed Woods to walk on water.
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 Jesus Shot
In this case, EA Sports' creative agency, Portland, OR-based Wieden+Kennedy, explicitly references the original clip (both in the video and in the YouTube posting itself) and includes clear EA branding at the end. <Remember, it's not a bug, it's a feature!>
So far, both clips have performed well for their respective creators. Looking at the first two months of each campaign, Bike Hero garnered 3.4+ million views across more than 70 unique placements, while Tiger Woods – Walk on Water generated 3.8+ million views across 190 unique placements.
Though Tiger wins the views battle, Bike Hero has accumulated well over 15,000 comments in two months while Walk on Water has collected 7,600+ over the past five months.
So what do these results tell us about how audiences react to these different approaches to viral video campaigns? This depends on how you like your viral video performance. Aside from retail sales, what’s more important when it comes to measuring the brand impact of a viral video campaign: total views? the corresponding conversation? overall audience sentiment? all of the above? As always, we'd love to know what you think!
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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.
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We'd like to thank Sarah Glass, a recent addition to the Visible Measures analytics services team, for her contributions to this post. Sarah joins us with a solid background in interactive and direct marketing research, as well as an unhealthy obsession with the Twilight series. :)
