The leading video was uploaded to amybethhale’s channel on Oct. 21st 2008 and sat quietly for months with minor incremental views.  We first saw it in an email early that fall as the virus had not yet taken hold but was clearly spreading as the email was addressed to this sneezer’s entire contact list.

Source: Amybeth's YouTube Insights

The beginning of 2009 marked a steady increase for this particular video increasing daily all the way through February as well.  Finally, its daily views peaked in March reaching up to about 70k a day.  This comes from Amybeth Hale’s YouTube insights as she held the channel with the leading video accounting for 4.5 million of the total views.  Her insights also tell us that this increase in views was predominantly because the United States finally picked up the contagious piece of media.     

From the post Understanding Viral Videos: Production Vs Distribution the description of a sleeper viral can be explained and mapped out via the increase in popularity as it spread through various audiences and delivery systems.

The research and assembly that was done by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and Jeff Brenman to create this video provides a clear glimpse at what exceptional content can do by itself. 

Cheers!

Her Morning Elegance

These two pieces of art represent videos that grow out of the content production side of the viral model (bottom).  In Her Morning Elegance it is visually obvious to see why it has a multi million view count.  The popularity comes from the time and effort it would take to create this clip.  

Source: Tubemogul

Looking at Signs the catch is not as easily identifiable.  The video uses storytelling as its hook and holds your attention long enough to want some answers.  The two subjects of the film draw you into voiceless suspense and use classic narrative techniques to elevate your emotions throughout a 12 minute video.  

Since it was uploaded to YouTube on January 29th Signs has roughly averaged 18k (views) a day.  Looking at the graph shown on the left suggests Signs is a typical content based viral as the daily average (views) has dipped recently to roughly 10k but the cumulative views show little indication of flattening over the last two weeks proving the clip has some “stickiness”.     

Signs

In the book Made to Stick, which positions itself as an addition to Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, authors Chip and Dan Heath outline 6 guidelines to making a message sticky.  Keeping a message simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional and using stories help people remember whatever it is your trying to communicate.  

These six guidelines aren’t new to marketers and can be found lacing your consumer behaviour textbooks but the examples provided within Made to Stick help understand in depth what is occurring to achieve the stickiness.  These videos utilize these concepts as Signs tell a story and Her Morning Elengance shows you video in an unexpected way. 

Signs and Her Morning Elegance are in a class of viral in which the distribution channels spring up almost organically.  Links, friends emailing each other, Facebook posts and blogs picking up the clips as a cool content piece help develop their channels of distribution from a pull factor rather than a sponsored push strategy. 

Source: AboutViral

From the model above you can see that the circles of mainstream interest may still be focused on niche markets towards the outside depending on how the clips started to snowball.  The outer rings for example would be full of film buffs whose specific interests lead them to consider these creative pieces as deserving of recognition.  The inner circles then would ultimately move more towards those groups of people who find the story intriguing or the stop motion extremely unique while not yet understanding what stop motion is or how long that actually takes to produce.    

Cheers!

Note: Her Morning Elegance is a music video so it has the distinct advantage of music as a catalyst.

In previous decades the question was debated through examples of companies like Comcast and Disney (who almost joined under one umbrella way back when).  Comcast and Disney both flirted with the idea of having Pocahontas and Simba following through cable pipelines controlled by one entity, but they are still pitted to battle over what is king. 

When the distribution nuke (commercial Internet) dropped, companies like YouTube formed and Dan Ackerman Greenberg released an article in November 2007 titled “The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral Videos”.  The article itself has reached an astounding number of comments (757, March 16th 2008) and rehashed the argument as to whether content is king in this New Media age.      

The comments, like any really good article, are full of opinions from both sides.  Some recognize that marketing has been manipulatively presenting material for years only the back end work took place in the pubs, restaurants and clubs that the newspaper editors or TV tycoons use to hang out in.  Now the playing field has moved online.

Secondly, others think it’s disgusting and that Dan is ruining the credibility of the Internet as a medium, instilling paranoia and distrust in the readers of online content.  

Thirdly, the middle of the spectrum opinions outline a few things that Dan is doing are actually unethical, such as having a conversation with himself via fake users (creative self spamming) but, see the value in the other strategies present.         

Here is the fine line between promotion and spamming.  Dan’s claim that there’s just too much content out there to dream of your video ever becoming viral rings like a justification for the strategy but viral videos still make it to most viewed pages organically.  It depends on the subject matter of content.  

Dan is right in the sense that a video designed to steer an audience towards an agenda of driving attention or sales to a company is not the most appealing content for the majority.  Therefore, the Comotion Group has decided to implement these tactics to compete with the mass amount of “real” videos that they are competing against.  

The above posted video shows the irony of his claim that content is not king.  There are numerous examples of organic content going through a series of events to reach Viral status.  Cue Star an A Cappella Tribute, Her Morning Elegance or Everything’s Amazing Nobody’s Happy to name a few recent ones.  

The category of content Dan needed to promote (trailers) is said to be the Film Cloverfield.  Trailers have marketing budgets and can be referred to as “Flu Virals”.  They appear, are extremely visual and exciting, everyone talks about them, the release date comes, the actual (peer) reviews come out and people are inoculated getting their fix or decide it’s not worth it.  
Arguably there are a few trailers that change the upper echelon of viral videos.  Slumdog Millionaire for one, but that film boast pure quality.  It won numerous Oscars and is scored with an example of viral music; MIA’s Paper Planes.      

Finally, the concept within the Cloverfield trailers is driven by content.   The fact that you never see the monster in the clips isn’t a distribution element.  It is a classic tactic of suspense creation.  To borrow from Lucky Number Slevin’s line “That’s when villain is most effective”.   

Content is king.  Certain people or companies, with built up networks focusing on certain subject categories will be able to influence the attention specific content gets.  This is especially true if they implement Dan’s tactics but by no means should this be considered the Bible of viral marketing, maybe just a chapter in Revelations.

Cheers!

Update March 20th: Zideo.nl is a video content site and the founder has this strategic advice for youth when making their videos.    

Create the video around these guidelines:   50% Content, 15% Metadata, 20% Thumbnail and 15% Promotion