Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Let’s make a viral video!



Ok I’ve heard this one way too much. No I can’t make you a viral video but I can make you a cool youtube video. The viral part is not up to me.

It takes three things to get the sleeper hit or viral video giant. A great idea, a lot of luck and big numbers (oh and a million friends passing it around.)

Anyone knows that to get one “Napoleon Dynamite” you have to make a thousand horrifically bad films, none of which any of us has ever hear of.

Budweiser makes more than a hundred commercials and then picks a select few just days before the Super Bowl to see what tests the best and has the best shot at Super Bowl Fame.

Again to ensure you get a viral or sleeper hit you would need to produce many many pieces with multiple writers and directors and have a lot of cash. And even then it up to the igods.

My first questions when approached with this quarry is why? What do you want to accomplish? Who do you want to talk to? The great success of W/K and the terrific Old Spice stuff was done with a much bigger budget then most midsize companies have. They are selling the cool. They are not selling the deodorant. And they had to have a great ideas, a big director, special effects and talent. Then they did a crap load of them and threw them against the wall and some stuck and others did not. We know the ones that stuck. They were awesome, the others not so much.

Viral works great if they are very lame or very cool. Both hard to pull off well and harder to repeat. How many more movies have you seen the Vote for Pedro dude in?

The Trick is in the idea, in the numbers and yes still in a little luck. You can produce low budget youtube videos but harness your expectations and know what you want them to accomplish.

No comments:

Post a Comment