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.

Air New Zealand is one of my favorite airlines in Asia-Pacific for their marketing strategy in these few years. They’ve introduced brand icon Rico and they’ve been very active on new media to engage and interact with their community.
They recently made a new video featuring Rico and Snoop Dogg, published around 3 days ago and have got more than 200K views on Youtube.

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

I’m often very sad about the music culture these days, when songs are all produced for profit and how they make people love their music with all the lifestyle marketing tactics. Cuban music (or any other non-mainstream music) on the other hand don’t do that, they aren’t desperate for attention, they aren’t playing music for money, they just love music and believe in it.

PR/ Social Media Agencies that produce Pop Music:

Social media is this new shiny thing to all business owners and decision makers, like a new trend of music culture comes up. What agencies do is that they create proposals filled with useless tactics (aka “creative ideas”), they go into client meetings and propose some sort of viral campaigns to the clients. Many clients like to give it a try, they think it’s too good to be true, but they don’t have enough knowledge on it and got greedy after seeing all these viral videos with 2 million views.

Obviously, many agencies like that might not know what they are talking about (like how some pop singers don’t know anything about music), for them it is only business, they just have to do what they can to grab the cash, so they just have to tell the clients whatever they want to hear.

PR/ Social Media Agencies that produce Cuban Music:

There’s another type of agencies, these agencies have great understanding of what social media is, and they know what’s best for their clients. However, not many clients would take the offer, because the process doesn’t sound as exciting as viral campaigns.

What should clients do?

I’m not saying Lady Gaga is bad, and I’m not saying short-term viral campaigns never work for business. I think clients should get the balance and start to think from both perspective when deciding to engage on social media.

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!

There have been many viral websites lately that requires users to upload images of themselves, most of these websites have face detection script on it which allows them to add funny and special effect to the faces.

This one is a little bit different, instead of adding effects to images, this creates a movie about you. It is campaign by Sweden’s TV licensing body Radiotjänst.

You can choose to upload an image of using the Webcam, I picked to use the webcam.

Start with people waiting to know who the "Hero" is

Still waiting...

The hero is... Tim Ho! Trying to look serious in the office.

Everyone loves me

I'm everywhere

Artists make paintings of me

At the end of the movie, it requests Swedish ID #

The film quality is very well done.

You can try creating your own movie here.

The real “Social Media Gurus” don’t really speak like this, but very similar. Reconsider when someone just come up and tell you how they can create you or your company a social media strategy just because they have so many followers on Twitter and how great and popular they are on social media.

This video is going viral now, thanks @thomascrampton for sending it!

I actually laughed out loud on this one. Very funny concept and the actors are great! It is a spoof viral video created by Lineline TV and posted on January 5 (Day of Google announcing Nexus One, it’s trending on Youtube right now with about 200 thousand views and 1077 good ratings.

Below are some of the features of the “Fxck you iPhone”:
- Texts Asses to iPhone users
- Audio Neutralization
- Optimized urination interface
- Send tools to dangerous alleys

We should be careful at iPhanatics meetups from now on!