If you missed Digital Citizens: Pressing the go viral button: myths, memes, YouTube and the future of TVCs, here’s a run-down of the night’s discussion. Liveblog available as well.
Panellists:
Clive Burcham is the founder of the Conscience Organisation and the Happy Farm. He’ll be talking about what makes a video “go viral”.
Heather Crawford from University of New South Wales will share some insights from her research into attention-poor audiences who are increasingly consuming multiple forms of media simultaneously and how you might create effective Television Commercials for them.
A lover of all things You Tube and DIY filmmaking, Sam Andruszkiewicz was an independent video producer for over 5 years. Sam is the video content producer for internal communications and creates content for the corporate You Tube channel. At Digital Citizens 8, Sam will share what makes a successful You Tube strategy for a large organisation like Telstra.
Sam Andruszkiewicz
The amount of content on YouTube is vast and growing exponentially, so if you want to cut through, you need to include elements that will encourage virality, or shareability. Consumers of Telstra’s YouTube channel content find the videos by search and sharing.
Telstra has two YouTube channels – Telstra Corp and TelstraKnowHow. Telstra Corp is a product-driven, expert-led space which humanises the Telstra brand by engaging employees to explain the newest and most exciting tech offerings. This channel is popular with tech journos and is often featured on tech blogs and shared by their readers. TelstraKnowHow is directed at Telstra customers who have purchased a product and provides directions and instructions on how to use Telstra technology.
Telstra’s YouTube foray began with the premise that if the video site’s raison d’être was to “Broadcast Yourself” then Telstra needed to get their tech message across. They attempted to do this by posting video of executive interviews about the cutting-edge technology that Telstra provides, but the low number of views and comments (most of which were negative) quickly alerted them to the fact that their social video attempts were not engaging their audience. So they changed tack, adopting an unscripted, raw style (video shot in one 15 minute take and minimally edited) and used their most valuable resource – smart Telstra staff who knew all about the technology that consumers were interested in, with the ability to ex-plain how it functions to the average Joe as well as tech journos and gadget geeks.
They immediately saw an improvement in the reception of their videos, and found that viewers reacted well to the unvarnished production values of the clips, finding them more in keeping with the honesty, transparency and openness inherent in social sites such as YouTube.
Like any other social network, being a part of the YouTube community is important for brands wanting to operate successfully in this space. Andruszkiewicz explained that YouTube has evolved into a medium like any other, and thus has its own genres which users are familiar with – ‘unboxing’ and ‘product review’ being two which have particular relevance to Telstra. It’s important to know these tropes before you start producing content, as well as the language of the medium and the etiquette – brands are not exempt from the sharing, commenting and calls to action that other users partake of.
Telstra are also using YouTube to create a community around entrants to their sponsored Tropfest Mobile Masterpiece short film competition.
Heather Crawford
Crawford has just conducted research on the universality of humour across counties and cultures, with a focus on Australia, the USA & China. Globally, $173 billion will be spent this year on humorous (or at least attempted humorous) ads. A study of three days of advertising (unique ads only) in the three studied countries revealed 36 per cent of advertising in Australia was (intended to be) humorous, compared to 29 per cent of American ads and a quarter of Chinese TVCs.
Heather’s next step was to engage an agency to create three increasingly violent versions of the same spot for a hypothetical product – Hamma energy drink. She then showed the ads to Aussie, America and Chinese focus groups to gauge their reception of the content. Interestingly, Australians were the group with the most ‘traditional’ values when it came to advertising (no actual explanation of what ‘traidtoinal’ entailed, unfortunately) and also the most benevolent in their attitudes to others. But when it came to tolerance of violent media, results showed individual personality type far outweighed nationality when it came to response to violence in advertising. Across all cultures, people with the most individualistic worldviews tended to respond the most positively to violent humour, and there were more of these people in China than the other two countries, with America having the lowest numbers of highly individualistic citizens.
Clive Burcham
Clive presented some ‘Lessons from the Coalface’ of the social video work TCO has done for their clients. With the rapidly-expanding volume of online video and the massive popularity of social media, many clients approach agencies asking for ‘a viral video’ to build their brand or earn some free media to publicise their campaign or product. Of course, no one can just make a viral, rather it’s a case of making a good video, targeting it wisely and then crossing your fingers that you’ve provided something of value to the audience you’re aiming for.
Burcham imagines the process as an act of ‘audience value exchange,’ whereby you give content rewards the consumer for engaging with, and sharing, your branded message. Check out TCO’s Tourism Australia campaign which enlisted two backpackers to record their Australian adventures, which were edited into “My Trip In A Minute” videos, placed on YouTube and received over 500,000 views in a fortnight, with the most viewed clip earning a prize.
Clive suggested all creative advertising ideas should be thought of as social ideas, or PR campaigns along the lines of The Best Job In The World campaign, Whopper Freakout and TCO’s Text-A-Holics. The Boost Mobile Text-A-Holic campaign was designed to promote the company’s 0.01c rate for SMS. The idea hinged around the fact that teenagers are prolific texters, to the extent that they could be seen as suffering from a medical condition. TCO identified four main ‘conditions’ and provided tongue-in-cheek diagnostic quizzes which were distributed via social media channels. Teens loved it, and filled in their text-related symptoms with gusto, and provided Boost’s main CRM database to this day, but mainstream media didn’t exactly get the joke and various news sources reported on the new psychosis gripping the nation’s children. Despite the tut-tutting of news anchors, it became a priceless PR exercise.
The next factor when making something you hope will go viral is the built-in social media propellant, the vital ‘Give-A-Fuck-Factor’ – will people give a… rats about the content you are creating? Echoing Telstra’s successful YouTube strategy, Burcham says that high production values and SFX do not necessarily create engagement. Look back at the viral video hall of fame – Keyboard Cat featured very little CGI explosions, Double Rainbow wasn’t even in HD, and people watched a panda sneezing through a handycam because it was cute and funny and unusual and exotic. Always bear this in mind when you’re creating content.
Then you need to find your audience. Who are you talking to? Who have you created your video for? In the case of TCO’s ‘PS3 Slams Into Bravia’ video, it was video gamers, so they enlisted two of the biggest gaming bloggers in the country and let them sit in on filming the piece (and fed them lunch). The bloggers both wrote glowing reviews of the day and their legion fans got to work sharing these posts with the gaming community. The video got 18,000 hits on YouTube in 24 hours and 12,000 comments and likes – an incredible engagement level for any piece of content. The product then sold out 1/3 of the way though the promotion. TCO generally spends 50 per cent of budget on creating video and 50 per cent on media, and always plans media integration from the outset of the creative idea.
And if you get it wrong and your audience doesn’t like your content, the great thing about YouTube is you not only know almost immediately – you may not have noticed but internet commenters can be very honest, even verging on blunt in their appraisals – and you have the opportunity to remove, re-edit and re-upload content in a very short amount of time. YouTube even lets you know at what point in your video viewers are switching off, so you can pinpoint hotspots and low points to alter.
