Research into viral ads

What is a Viral Advert?

 

 

A viral advert (also known as a viral ad) is an advertisement spread throughout all medias, especially social media, to achieve wide recognition of their companies product or campaign. For a campaign or product to go viral there is certain criteria an advertisement must achieve in order to be successful at this. This criteria consists of your advertisement featuring: information or entertainment. By containing information and/or entertainment in an advert, this creates a common talking point for viewers which encourages people to spread word about their product as the entertainment and/or information caught their eye which leads me on to my next point.

 

 

Despite information and entertainment being key to an advertisement becoming viral, this doesn't automatically make the advert become successful. To ensure an advert becomes viral, the company must find a way to target their specific audience and use the information and entertainment according to this factor. By combining these techniques together the information, entertainment and common interests of the product combine creating a successful viral marketing campaign where the public spread word across all medias about your product.

 

 

Furthermore companies tend to use comedic aspects quite a lot to make their advert light hearted and fun for the audience to view as fun and light hearted experiences are easier to recall and remember.

 

Examples of successful viral adverts

Old Spice was an extremely successful viral marketing campaign evident from the 54.9 million views on YouTube. In this advert the campaign contains a lot of fast paced editing which adds to the entertainment to the advert as this encourages the audience to keep watching as they don't want to miss anything. Furthermore by having the main actor break the 4th wall and engage the audience with a direct address, this encourages the audience to feel a connection with the actor on the screen, persuading them to buy the product as they have this connection with the actor.

This TNT advert also went viral due to it's action packed entertainment. Unlike other adverts, this captures the audience based on what you would see in an action packed TV series which is very clever as when there is a lot of events happening on screen the audience is usually gripped and can't look away. This advert was extremely successful as this video has received 55.4 million views on YouTube.