I’ve seen great videos produced by boutique agencies last year in 2011, including two of my favorites both by John St.’s Catvertising and Pink Ponies.
Buzzman, a French interactive agency just created an amazing piece, a case study styled video highlighting Mayans versus Egyptians as 2 competing brands and their tactics to dominate the market by launching the “end of the world” campaign.

This is an extremely clever video created by LG for their latest “World’s Slimmest Television”. Video shows the thief directly facing the security cameras as he walks out the electronic shop, the TV is so slim that you can’t see him holding the TV until the last camera.

Youtube is often seen as a channel for hosting videos, and what clients like to call – “viral videos”. Most brands, however, have underestimated the power of putting creativity to branded Youtube channel. Perrier’s new campaign is a perfect example of a great use of Youtube channel.

Perrier has been positioning themselves as sexy, edgy, playful, and fun. After the interactive Dita von Teese Perrier mansion campaign they built last year, Ogilvy Paris recently launched another interesting campaign for Perrier again, and this time, they use video content to tease for actions. Below is the channel journey for this campaign.

1) You will see the video below shared by your friends or blogs, with annotation button on video that takes you to Perrier’s Youtube page.

2) You land on Perrier’s branded Youtube page, showing you the amount of people who have viewed the first video.

3) “Sexier” videos will be unlocked for certain number of views, therefore, the more you share it, the faster you will see the content.

4) Your friends will see you sharing it, and they will do the same from step 1.

This is a very clever mechanism connected to their Facebook fanpage, it’s quite obvious that they’ve been working quite closely with Youtube to develop the page.

Agency: Ogilvy & Mather Paris

Sex always sells. I’ve seen tons of ads and other marketing tactics that use sex as a major tool to drive views, but this new campaign by La Senza is “sexily creative” and has the potential to go viral. It is a dead simple mechanism in terms of sharing and microsite development, it’s a piano formed by sexy models in La Senza lingerie. Users can play this piano with keyword, record it and share it with friends. Smart way to collect email addresses with the incentive of free lingerie for a year!

Give it a try here!

Hat Tip to Ogilvy colleague @Azwar

Working in an agency, and being in the leading social media team in Asia Pacific, there are a few common questions that I always get. “How to make my video viral” is one of the most popular ones that comes up all the time, clients even tried to pay us for a “formula” to make things viral. I’m about to give you the answer, for free, which might not answer your question.

The word “viral video”

I was in a discussion with Thomas Crampton and John Stauffer few weeks ago about viral videos, they both made a really good point about how people slowly think that “viral video” is a noun or a category of video, videos that get easily spread around the Internet. Truth is it’s the other way around, they are called viral videos because they went viral, not because they were produced viral. “Viral” is the adjective used to describe a video that went popular.

My Formula

I don’t have the formula to create viral effect, no one does. Videos don’t go viral by luck, but no one can promise “viralness” before it happens. It’s like parents wanting their child to be the world’s champion for swimming, they could do whatever to try, spend tons of money to get the best trainer in the world, but the trainer can not say that he’s training a “World’s Champion Child” until he actually becomes the world champion.

Although I don’t have a formula…

Below are some of the important elements I found in previous videos that went viral for your reference:

Unexpected (but at the same time viewers can relate to their daily lives): Popcorn with Cellphones

Extremely Cute: Bob Marley Baby

Extremely Funny: The Sneezing Baby Panda

Doing certain things that viewers can’t/ wouldn’t do: Will it Blend

Stealing fame: Re: @aplusk | Old Spice

Cool or sexy or Environmental – helping viewers to reflect the personalities they want to become: Agent Provocateur

[Show as slideshow]

A smart experiential campaign was recently created by Creative Agency Owen & Stork. Simular to Ogilvy & Mather’s $73,000 bill from a bar campaign, the key to this is to attract instant attention by reproducing something that does not happen in everyday’s life. If you’ve read Seth Godin‘s book Purple Cow, you must know how powerful it can be to be “memorable”.

Not that hiring hot girls to give out free samples wouldn’t work, but this is taking free sampling tactics to it’s fullest because this piece of content can be leveraged online afterwards if the whole process was filmed.

Just helping to spread this amazing piece created by my colleagues over at Ogilvy advertising. It is not a social media campaign, but the idea behind this ad campaign is absolutely clever and touching, the message they want to spread is the hospitality Shangri-La hotels offer, the “hospitality from the heart”.

They have uploaded this piece to Youtube on June 1st and it’s already reached more than 21,000 viewers, that’s in average around 6,000 views per day so far which is quite an impressive number for a TV piece.

The Behind the Scene of this piece is very interesting too, you can find it on their microsite, http://ournature.shangri-la.com/en/

Parody in advertising can gain more attention than the original piece if it’s done well. This piece definitely went viral. Specsavers, an online glasses shop created this great viral piece that mocks an older advertisement by AXE. AXE has always been selling sex appeal in their ads, Specsavers’ ad is clever enough to take advantage of all the buzz AXE has.

The original Ad by AXE

And here’s the Specsavers’ ad

This a a creative online app I discovered that generates music from any URL. All you have to do is to type in a URL, the program will then analyze the html script in the <body> content and generate a unique piece of music for this URL. User can share this piece of music through Twitter or Facebook.

It is a thought leadership project by a UK digital creative agency DLKW

Check out Codeorgan now.

This is a viral piece was posted on the same day as the iPad released. Jakob Hammarback and Jon Wingard created the iSandwhitch 4G as an experiment to see if it can go viral. It is a video showing how they use different ingredients all put together on a piece of bread to create the same shape of the iPhone.

On their blog, they said the video got them 4403 visits on the first day they uploaded. It has more than 18,000 views on youtube now and growing. Creative idea and smart timing!