What makes a video viral? What do the most viral clips have in common? And what lessons can we learn to insure our video work in this space is as forward-friendly as possible?
I want to spend this week exploring this topic and welcome any input you can share because fundamentally, those of us with deep experience in consumer video need to reset our expectations and objectives. As creative strategies migrate from focusing solely on the needs of broadcast network videos to the more specific demands of social network broadcasting, knowing what most encourages viewers to share and spread your video will be critical to brand success. Clearly, not all viral videos are marketing driven, but even those that aren’t can provide clues about the common denominators of viral success.
Why should this matter? Why fret about something that while popular, still represents a proportionately small percentage of client marketing budgets?
Because the future of brand-building advertising–the classic television image spot creatives love to produce–will continue moving into this new space. Creating engaging, entertaining, relevant video for brand advocates to adopt and forward audiences they select as relevant insures more impact for your message than a general broadcast airing. In a marketplace increasingly defined by affiliations, tribes or communities, marketers that create surprising, engaging video that speaks directly to those groups will find more return for their brand image investment.
Which means nothing less than a reinvestment in the kind of production that excites and pushes creative people.
The future of high-end video production will be vastly different, but it will also prove to be a hill of fun. We just must do our homework around strategies, techniques and lessons for building success in this new forum. Video storytelling skill is not platform dependent, it’s aptitude based. And it would be a massive waste to dismiss the skills and lessons so many of us acquired over the years, merely because we’re ‘television creatives.’
Vision is vision. And ideas either excite or they don’t. In every medium…
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By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79
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