Visible Measures Blog

Jennifer's Body, the dark comedy/horror film starring Ms. Megan Fox as a man-eating demon, was the most-watched online film trailer of the week. With seven weeks to go before the film's release, a cursory analysis of the comments on the film's trailers reveals that they have many of the elements necessary for a successful digital video campaign: Megan Fox, Megan Fox, and Megan Fox. As one might expect, the comment terms "Megan" and "Fox" dominate trailer-related commentary. The majority of the views for the film this week came from a clip entitled "Megan Fox Talks Dirty," an interview from Comic-Con 2009, which helped the campaign grow by nearly 150%. The film is just one of the four horror flicks on the Chart this week.

The interactive, choose-your-own-adventure style A Different Ending was the only campaign to experience growth on the Chart this week, increasing over 100%, and taking second place. The anti-violence campaign drops you into the life of a British teenager on the verge of making a series of life-altering decisions. Do you listen to the devil on your shoulder and take the knife, or do you play nice and leave it at home? 51% of viewers preferred to play dirty.

Potential viral video hits appear online every day. These hits-in-waiting vary in popularity, from Susan Boyle, to United Breaks Guitars, to Evian's Roller Babies, but at their core they all have that special something that attracts Internet video audiences by the millions. The latest hit features an unexpectedly entertaining take on the traditional wedding ceremony entrance. 

With three weeks until its official release, Sony's District 9 leads the Top Ten Online Film Trailers Chart this week. The Blomkamp/Jackson science fiction pic, which deals with alien apartheid, experienced exponential growth last week, but this week's view counts dropped by 45% to just over 950,000. In addition to District 9, Sony has two other films on the chart this week (the Butler/Heigl-starring The Ugly Truth and animated Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs).  

Evian's Live Young campaign pulled down nearly 12 million additional views this week, more than three times the views of all the other campaigns combined, making it the most-watched viral video ad campaign of the year. As we reported yesterday, this success can be partly attributed to continued marketing support for the campaign as Evian continues to inject new assets like behind-the-scenes clips and interviews with the babies. (For more on how Evian's campaign became the most-watched of the year, check out our post: Good Campaign Planning Plus Babies Equals A Winning Combination in Viral Video.)

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.

The 100 Million Views Club welcomes five new entrants this month, with Michael Jackson leading the group, making an impressive entrance with two iconic music videos: Thriller and Beat It. Both videos experienced surges in viewership after the pop star's untimely death late last month, though Thriller, as we've previously reported, skyrocketed exponentially. Thriller's 219+ million views is good enough for 7th place all time, while Beat It takes 25th with 123+ million.

Over the past several years, Internet video has become an integral part of the online experience for movie-going audiences. Cinema buffs and casual movie-goers alike have instant access not only to movie trailers, but also to cast interviews, behind-the-scenes clips, audience video reviews, and more. While the film industry has acknowledged that this data is crucial for gauging a film's online buzz and audience interest, it has lacked a consistent, coherent way to measure, quantify, and compare the performance and impact of its online promotional efforts. 

Evian's Project Live Young shattered all Viral Video Chart view count records this week by generating a staggering 13.8 million views, an increase of over 650% from last week. To put this number into perspective, it more than doubles the aggregate performance of all the other campaigns on the chart this week. (!!) This appears to be the result of a well-orchestrated effort with multiple creative variations each receiving more than one million views. Not surprisingly, the spot featuring precocious animated infants dubbed "Roller Babies" is the most popular on Evian's YouTube user channel.

Beyond French bottled water, Microsoft dominated viral video advertising this week with campaigns featuring Xbox, Microsoft Office 2010, and Internet Explorer, taking third, fifth, and sixth place on the chart, respectively. Microsoft Office's campaign, the new entrant of the three, is a movie trailer for Microsoft Office 2010: The Movie, which looks like it would be a cool movie (an Enemy of the State / Matrix hybrid), if it were real. It will be interesting to watch how this campaign performs as the release date for Microsoft Office 2010 nears.

AXE Body Wash has returned to the chart after a three month hiatus, taking seventh place with nearly 500,000 views. It appears as though the new growth for The Fixers campaign comes from a number of clips uploaded to Heavy.com.

New Campaigns This Week

Besides Microsoft Office 2010: The Movie, Olympus' The Pen Story enters the ranks of the most-watched campaigns this week. The original clip for this campaign is driving the majority of views, though a number of copies have also generated significant viewership. Photographers and creatives should definitely check this one out.

Goodbye for Now

We bid adieu to T-Mobile Dance this week, which had been on the chart for 16 consecutive weeks. Cadbury’s Eyebrow Dance is now the chart's longest standing member, moving into its 17 week with another 360,000+ views, good enough for ninth place.

Top Performing Campaigns for the Week of July 6, 2009

Many of us plan our ultimate revenge when fighting with customer service representatives. Up until recently, we could write a nasty letter, fire off an expletive-packed e-mail, post to one of countless online discussion boards, relate the negative experience to friends, or take it out on a luckless employee who probably had nothing to do with the problem in the first place.

When brands and advertisers employ viral video to communicate with their audiences, they're starting a dialogue that wasn't possible a few years ago. In some ways, brands today are being thrust into the role of the traffic cop, setting the tone and direction of the conversation. As part of this, as soon as audiences get beyond initial interactions with a campaign, they go their own direction: copying, commenting, mixing, mashing, and re-uploading clips from the campaign. 

Air New Zealand came flying back onto the Chart this week to grab the top spot by producing what might possibly be one of the few airline safety videos people have ever attentively watched, and they watched it close to four million times, setting a new Chart record for the most views in one week. The spot, detailing the bare essentials of airline safety, is the second installment of the airline's "Nothing to Hide" campaign. It was launched at the end of June and began to take off the middle of last week.

Even as the world was saying goodbye to Michael Jackson yesterday, new online videos of the King of Pop continued to surface. They vary in form and content, but converge at the center of his loss, showing what may have been, what he left behind, and how his friends and family will remember him.

In the months we've worked with Ad Age Digital to showcase the most-watched viral video campaigns on the Ad Age Viral Video Chart, we've seen many campaigns explode onto the Top 10 only to quietly depart the following week. There have been a few standout campaigns, however, that have dominated the Chart for months at a time. Among these campaigns, Samsung's LED Sheep, T-Mobile's Dance, and Cadbury's Eyebrow Dance have each generated over 10 million views.

The L.A. Lakers took home the NBA Championship over two weeks ago, yet Nike Basketball's Most Valuable Puppets remains at the top of the Chart for the second week in a row. This is in stark contrast to the NBA's Where Amazing Happens campaign, which barely made the Chart this week. This discrepancy could be due to Nike Basketball injecting new assets into its campaign last week, which would speak to the importance and subsequent results of continued marketing support for viral video campaigns. Or, perhaps, it could be due to the staying power of puppets. What do you think?

Yesterday, we reported that Michael Jackson's Thriller had been viewed over 8.5 million times online since his death last Thursday. These results appear to have resonated with the online video viewing audience and were later reported in the Associated Press. We've been continuing to track Thriller's online video trends and can now confirm that the initial surge in viewership has accelerated significantly.