Praz: 2011

Analysis on Viral marketing and User generated Material

I will be analyzing two viral marketing videos and two users generated material videos. Viral marketing depends on a high pass-along rate from person to person. If a large percentage of recipients forward something to a large number of friends, the overall growth snowballs very quickly. Like viral marketing there User generated content refers to material on websites, and occasionally other media sources that is produced by the users of the website. This is different than, for example, a website designed by a company which puts forth material produced by professionals. The professionals do this to entertain and to advertise their products.

One of the first user generated videos I have watched was called ‘Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years’. This is user-generated video because it made by a boy, who took pictures of him for 6 years. This is a user-generated video because it’s an unprofessional video, which has been passed around and has up to twenty million views on you tube. In this video you can see the guy change through out the years, you can see this by his face how he maturing over the years. Even though this might be an amateur project, this video shows his personality and how much time he has spent doing this. Taking pictures of him everyday for six years is a hard task, which a lot of people will not be able to do.

Also another user-generated video I analyzed, was also an amateur video. It was called ‘amateur video with great sound effect’. This video has up to eighteen thousand views on you tube. This video has really high standard of sound effects, whereas the downfall of this video is the quality of it. The quality of the video could have been caused due to compression of file size, which would ruin the quality of the video. Personally I think the more successful user generated video between this two is the ‘Noah’ video of him taking pictures of himself and creating video. I say this because of the number of views he has had and the time, which has been put into this.

There are several astonishing viral marketing videos, which are very highly interesting to watch. One of the viral marketing videos I have seen quiet few times will be the ‘cyclist awareness- Test your awareness: do the test’. By watching this video you can see it is made to a professional standard and has a serious point. It’s an informative video, which tells you to watch out for cyclist on the road whilst driving. In this video there are eight guys in two groups playing basketball. The video tells you to count how many passes one of the team makes, whilst concentrating on that a bear walks through the middle and does moonwalk. This is not recognized whilst counting the number of passes the team makes. Then they put up a phrase, which says’ It’s easy to miss something you’re not looking for’ referring to cyclist on the road. A lot of people have viewed this because it’s like a game to see this but it also an effective video. This video was really successful because it was targeted at 150,000 people, but it went up to more than expected. Just on you tube itself this video gained up to 6.7 million views.

The second video I looked at was a burger king advertisement which was made in 2004. This advert is different to others because it does not really advertise burger king itself, it more like a video and you can submit you’re request on what you want the chicken in the advert to do and it will do what you request. It is an interesting advertisement, which grabs the audience’s attention. This video had up to 15 million views in the first five days it came out, and the views grew which hit more than 450 million views, which was very successful. The only problem with video was that it did not have anything to do with burger king.

I would say both of these advertisements are appealing in different ways except that the cyclist awareness one is more professional because it’s got message within it. Viral marketing and user-generated material are all appealing in different ways, which grabs the audience’s attention. This is why I have chosen these key videos to show the difference between the types of interactive videos. Interactive videos are watched a lot of by different people, this is because of social networking as well. When people find out about a video they would like to share with their friends and family, for example people like to share it on each other face book walls which then gets spread through face book as well creating thousands of viewers.