What’s required for viral videos to take off?
You might be contemplating the idea of using viral videos as part of your marketing activities. It is definitely worth a thought. But viral videos pose a huge risk: They either are hugely successful and completely take off, or they are completely ineffective failures. Take a look at ifilms viral video section and you’ll see a lot of videos that you would never pass around. So why should anyone else?

Here are a couple of suggestions in case you are thinking about viral videos:

1. Keep them short
The longer the video the harder it is to download or distribute the file. Ideally you have at least a version of the video that fits on MMS capable mobile phones. This way users can spread them around via Bluetooth, without Internet connectivity.

2. Get straight to the point
If I don’t see something interesting in an viral video in the first 15 seconds I won’t even bother watching the end of it. There are just too many out there.

3. Create a (mini)series
You might have an idea or a story that is too long for a short viral video. Think about breaking it up into several movies. Develop characters or a series of stories that your viewers will await once they have seen the first one. This way you can create a real hype. The first video gets seen by X amount of people. The next one by X amount times 100 and so on.

4. Have a good story or drop the whole idea
We have said it before: you need to stick out with something funny, drastic, chaotic, catastrophic or sensational. Oddset did a video during the last Euro Soccer Cup that had all that. (Germany was playing the Netherlands.)

5. Think about the Soccer World Cup
This will be a time when web surfers across the world will be swamped with content: online newspaper, blogs, discussion boards etc…
This will also be a time when they will all be talking with each other more than usual. It will be a VERY competitive playing field. If you are good sports you make the extra effort to come up with something rally special and it can have a huge impact.

Think about spoof videos of the World Cup Sponsors for a starter…

6. Avoid adult content
Yeah we all know it: sex sells. Resist the temptation. Nothing wrong with a little bit of skin. But we would definitely keep it PG13. Your distribution will be limited when you are crossing the barrier and need to put the “Are you over 18?” label in front of it. You don’t need that.

7. Avoid being too blunt
Your marketing message needs to be very subtle for a viral video to be successful. If you can avoid your logo altogether, then do it. Otherwise put it at the very end of the video.

This is one of the things a guerilla marketing agency should specialize in. Get a professional to help you. They should have ideas for stories and can manage the initial distribution of your viral video.

Sorry, but the next few sentences are purely commercial
Creating a buzz is what we do for a living. We’ve done it before and we will do it again. Our content producers have won numerous awards. We still have a couple of very compelling concepts for viral video campaigns in our drawer. They could be yours.
Ok, you read all this, so here is another funny one. I hope you don’t mind jokes about blondes.