Visible Measures Blog

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- No viral meme can last forever, right? As good as Old Spice's "Responses" campaign was, it's peaked and is now in a downward slide, losing 70% of its audience on the web last week.

Mind you, down 70% for Isaiah Mustafa still meant more than 11 million views for the customized YouTube responses alone and four of the top 10 slots on the Viral Chart. All versions of the Old Spice videos -- ads, responses and Odor Blocker videos -- have racked up 130 million views on the web since February, according to Visible Measures.

The question now is what, if anything, agency Wieden & Kennedy will do to keep the Mustafa magic alive. Paid placements? Another ad? Another web stunt?

One thing we do know: Mr. Mustafa is going to be a whole lot busier. He's landed a role in the latest Jennifer Aniston film "Horrible Bosses" and now has a holding deal at NBC.

It's a little early to assess the results of the campaign, but Old Spice is picking up market share. Although so is Gillette, whose "Perfect Length" advertises a different category but grew 123% in views last week.

Joining Old Spice on the chart this week is a new collaboration from YouTube, director Ridley Scott and Korean electronics giant LG, "Life in a Day." The campaign is soliciting video footage from people's daily lives that it's calling a "global experiment to create the world's largest user-generated feature film." Most views so far (2 million) are on the promo video. The resulting film will premiere at Sundance in January.

The Most-Watched Ads of the Week

Rank	Last Week's Rank	Brand	Campaign	Agency	Current Week's Views*	% Change in Views**	Watch
1	1	Old Spice	Responses	Wieden + Kennedy	11,309,342	-68%
2	8	Gillette	Perfect Length	Jack Morton; BBDO	2,159,215	123%
3	NEW	LG & YouTube	Life In A Day	NA	2,158,010	NEW
4	2	Old Spice	The Return of The Man Your Man Could Smell Like	Wieden + Kennedy	2,143,315	-62%
5	3	Old Spice	Odor Blocker	Wieden + Kennedy	1,993,413	-42%
6	4	Old Spice	The Man Your Man Could Smell Like	Wieden + Kennedy	1,928,529	-36%
7	7	EMC	EMC 20% Guarantee	Sharethrough	1,903,151	77%
8	5	Dentyne	Dentyne Pure	Platinum Rye; Sharethrough	1,210,476	-3%
9	NEW	Victoria's Secret	Temperature Rising	Razorfish; Sharethrough	963,783	NEW
10	10	Evian	Live Young	BETC Euro RSCG	939,553	12%

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

The data used for The Top 10 Viral Video Ads Chart was sourced from Visible Measures.

*See our Top Ad Campaigns page for our methodology.

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

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Apple storms the chart as this week's salutatorian with 1.8 million views for its highly anticipated iPhone 4. The Cupertino company's clip is a smart spot that focuses entirely on the new phone's Face Time app, which allows people to video chat over their respective iPhone 4s (yes, the future is now). Even better, the NA-produced ad is done without dialogue, only the nostalgia-steeped crackle of Louis Armstrong's "When You Smiling" tracked over images of grandparents, parents and soon-to-be-dads chatting with distant loved ones. Yes, it comes on thick. But it works. It almost makes you forget Steve Jobs' rant-prone presence on all things Apple and all things Apple doesn't like. Almost.

Another newcomer, Visa's World Cup campaign, comes in at 3rd place with 1.8 million views and features NBA star Steve Nash shouting "goooooaaaal!" in various dream sequences, though the punch line doesn't arrive till he wakes up and pulls off his T-shirt to reveal a woman's athletic bra -- a nod, no doubt, to Brandi Chastain's game-winning penalty kick against China in the women's World Cup match in 1999. She de-jerseyed post goal to reveal...well, you get it. That was 10 years ago, so we can't decide whether the kicker (no pun intended) is coyly funny, or just dated. Perhaps a bit of both.

But it was newcomer Gillette that grabbed the top spot this week with a whopping 2.7 million views for its "Perfect Length" vid featuring women responding to the question, "How do you like it shaved?" The answers, "Just a little patch..."; "I think it should always be tidy"; "...when it's smooth like that, I can't keep my hands off it" show that agency Jack Morton have little faith in the subtler shades of innuendo and prefer their double entendres to come across like hammer on concrete. It's a low grab, basically (pun heavily intended, if only to make sure Jack Morton gets it).

Meanwhile, Nike's "Write the Future" was bumped off the top spot this week, but remains in the top five with 1.6 million views, a 12% drop that may be a reflection of the U.S. team's ouster from the tournament. Come on, Brazil. Load it up.

The Most-Watched Online Video Ads of the Week

Rank	Last Week's Rank	Brand	Campaign	Agency	Current Week's Views*	% Change in Views**	Watch
1	NEW	Gillette	Perfect Length	Jack Morton	2,715,412	NEW
2	NEW	Apple	iPhone 4 Face Time	NA	1,834,187	NEW
3	NEW	Visa	Go Fans 2010 FIFA World Cup		1,820,448	NEW
4	1	Nike	Write the Future	Wieden + Kennedy	1,637,453	-12%
5	NEW	GMC	GMC Pickup Games	Leo Burnett, Starcom Worldwide; Digitas; Sharethrough	1,278,588	NEW
6	6	Evian	Live Young	BETC Euro RSCG	1,064,573	11%
7	4	Pepsi	Oh Africa	NA	1,002,063	-19%
8	7	Volkswagen	Driven By Fun	DDB	815,848	-3%
9	3	Microsoft	Xbox Project Natal	World Famous	661,657	-55%
10	8	Toyota	The Sienna Family	Saatchi & Saatchi	527,081	-21%

Source: Visible Measures

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Edmund Lee is a reporter at Advertising Age. You can find the original article here.

The data used for The Top 10 Viral Video Ads Chart was sourced from Visible Measures.

*See our Top Ad Campaigns page for our methodology.

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

For an end-to-end assessment of your online video campaign's performance or to notify us of an upcoming or in-market campaign, please contact us.

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Politicians say and do regretful things all the time. They've tried to redefine the word "is." They've shot their friends in the face. They've talked about wide stances in airport restrooms. They've fallen off stages. They've thrown up on Prime Ministers. They've had messy affairs and continued to run for the highest office in the land.

And yet, at a time when these ill-advised antics will live on forever through online video, politicians charge on unabated, unabashed, undeterred. This week alone, we have two of the all-time gaffe champions, Vice President Joe Biden and former President George W. Bush, going head to head. If you haven't seen their most recent exploits, Biden got overly rambunctious at the health care bill signing and dropped an expletive for the entire country to hear. Bush got a wet handshake in Haiti and wiped it off on former President Bill Clinton's sleeve. They're below.

Biden: This is a Big Deal

Bush: Handshake in Haiti

As we like to do here at Visible Measures when these sorts of events occur, we've measured the performance of each incident across the Web to see which is attracting the most attention. This matchup was particularly close.

Despite the press Biden's big deal received, Bush's wet hand has turned out to be a bigger deal in online video. Biden's slip of the tongue has yielded over 2.1 million views. Impressive, but Bush's wipe of the hand has inspired over 2.4 million views.

What do you think of these results? What are your favorite political gaffes? Let us know in the comments section below.

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I'd like to congratulate our friends and neighbors at Compete on their acquisition by TNS.  We have a lot of friends there and we have long admired their web analytics service, which at least indirectly "competes" with alexa, our friends at quantcast, our friends at Nielsen // NetRatings, our friends at comScore, and other web ratings services.  We also have a lot of relationships with people from Compete, and our chief architect Chris Gillett was the chief architect of Compete's core data processing system (along with our good friend and advisor, David Cancel, Compete's founder and former CTO). 

The trend with new media has always been a proliferation of content and audiences followed by a demand for rich analysis in order to help better achieve returns on investment for all parties.  Analytics is definitely key to maximizing and monetizing campaigns online as the web is "inheritantly measurable".  We believe that online video represents a new paradigm with a whole new set of challenges around measurement and valuation.  Video is seeing something similar now to what occurred with the early days of the web, and we are honored to be a part of it!