May 30
Viral Video Case Study
Guest Blogger: Corey Hammond
Last night I attended a great presentation by Authentic Films in their loft in Cleveland, OH. The event was put on by The Web Association who is a group for the Northeast Ohio internet community. Authentic Films presented a case study of a viral video they did for PC Live. PC Live is an online tech support company with similar services as Geek Squad. They were looking to launch their brand and specifically wanted to try and create a viral video. Authentic Films and the PR company they were teamed with took us through the process of how they did things. It was really interesting to get the a film production company’s take on how to do everything. What stood out to me was the preparation that went into everything. There was the initial idea creation to character outlines to scripting to casting. All these elements went into it before they even tried to produce the video. Here is the video they shot that went viral.
From what the PR firm and Authentic Films estimated, the video got about 2 million views online plus some TV exposure. Viral video isn’t a new thing. A lot of major brands like Doritos and Dove are doing viral video these days. These viral video can be leveraged and become even stronger with things like social media. All in all it was a great look at the production process involved in creating this video and the results from the time and effort they all put in.
June 4th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Guess this was a pretty interesting presentation. Seems like a great example of how viral video can have a great impact on traffic flow into a site. It would be interesting to see some stats about how much the traffic actually translated into the conversions they were looking for. How many actual people did what the company wanted them to do (which I couldn’t determine from the video), buy a product, submit contact information, etc. Did they collect any of that type of data in relation to the experiment?
Also, what is the perception of some of the more niche social media / news sites, like DIGG. Could a viral video with no real redeeming quality make it on a site like this? Entertainment V Content I guess.
June 4th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Unfortunately they didn’t collect any metrics from the case study. The only information they said they got was the client got about 20 times the traffic they were expecting and deemed the viral video campaign a success. It’s pretty hard to tell what people are coming to the site for when there are no links. The traffic would have shown up as direct traffic. To make things more complicated, they had other efforts going on at the same time.
Viral videos thrive on sites like Digg I think. People like them whether they are just entertaining or whether they provide valuable content.