Posts Tagged ‘online video’

When Mark Lawrenson criticised the referee in the world cup final last night, using  the line “should’ve gone to Specsavers” the optician’s marketing people must have whooped as loud as the crowd in Madrid.

While their catch phrase has clearly now surpassed mere advertising and entered the common lexicon, their viral video is still no match for a cat in a box, who’s clocked up to 1.3 million views.

Their Lynx Effect spoof advertisement, which has 850K views to date, was no doubt fuelled by the TV advertising campaign. The new viral released today, a spoof of the ’80s hit TV show Das Boot, will only run online and is an attempt by Specsavers to take ownership of their ‘viral space’, according to a report in The Drum.

Personally I prefer the cat. Here’s both, What do you think?

Read the rest of this entry »

Two very different videos virals featuring the iphone 4 are topping the video viral charts in the UK & US this week, one ’smaltzy’ the other subversive, begging the question, does the UK online video audience want more edgy content than their US cousins?

Nice use of viral video by tennis racquet brand Head, starring Andy Murray performing some cool tennis trick shots. 550K views in a week since the release on YouTube.

BP has got to the stage in its reputational decline where it is not just a falling stock but a laughing stock, with 7 million views of this spoof video so far and climbing, making a mockery of BP’s own videos of the containment effort.

BBH London won Best in Show at the 35th One Show awards last night for this six minute online video for Johnnie Walker whisky starring Robert Carlyle:

Erik Qualman’s music-enhanced, statistics-based video of social media’s wildfire growth was one of the B2B viral video hits of last year. With social media moving so quickly, he’s already updated it for May 2010 with yet more revelatory intelligence, including that Facebook has now overtaken it’s own country of origin as the third largest by population in the world, behind India and China. When Zuckerburg was programming ‘the facebook.com’ – as described in David Kirkpatrick’s new book, he knew he was on to something big, but this!?

Online video views in the UK are up 37%, climbing from 4 billion to 5.5 billion views, according to comScore’s latest video matrix report.

YouTube continues to be a chief driver, with Google sites overall up 17%, though comScore has noticed a trend towards longer format video viewing in the UK, something also seen in the US, with views of BBC sites, for example, up 143% on last year.

“In particular, we’ve seen eyeballs move towards the online channel to watch more long-form, professional video content, such as popular broadcast network TV shows” says comScore director Mike Read.

Some marketers are keen to exploit the growth in video viewing, Reckitt Benckiser, owner of brands including Nurofen, Finish & Calgon is doubling spend on online video to $40 million this year, according to a report in Ad Age.

Chad Hurley, one of the founders of YouTube predicts that the next five years for the site will be all about “stickability” and convergence of channels.

In order to encourage people to stay on the site for hours rather than minutes, he says, “we need to create a much more seamless experience across devices.”

Interviewed in The Telegraph, Hurley says “People think about the world of TV and the world of online video as being different ways to distribute video, but what happens when every TV is connected to wi-fi with a browser? What does that mean for your distribution opportunities? And these budgets dedicated to digital online – that proportion spent on video versus the big dollars that are being spent against TV – what happens when those worlds collide and is it just one thing? That is what we envision.” Read the rest of this entry »

In the subtitled, wartime lampoon of Toyota’s agency competition to create a video for the Yaris, there’s a line saying “How f*&*%&% hard is it to do a Facebook fan page, a You Tube viral or a Twitter account?” Very, as it turns out, Toyota has been forced to withdraw the real winning entry, branded variously as sexist, inappropriate and even incestuous.

At the beginning of the noughties, an advert like this wouldn’t have caused any ripples globally at all, it might have turned up on the Clive James show as a cultural curiosity and then forgotten. Ten years on and the combination of broadband, YouTube and social media means this advert has been subject to instant international condemnation.

Yet in Australia, they’re probably wondering what the fuss is about. The female copywriter, the director and the directors mum all said they thought the script for the ad was very funny and the panel of Australian Saatchi & Saatchi and Toyota executives who chose it as the winner obviously agreed.

Looks to me like they just had the wrong panel of judges, probably very senior executives with great experience in the Australian car market but no experience of the international dimension of viral video.

Here’s the offending video