Oh it's viral marketing week already? That lovely time of year when you imagine all the modern mad men sit around their offices and discuss how to market their products to a bunch of kids who have zero interest in being told what to do.
So firms spend X amount of dollars on marketing strategists, teen focus groups, and the latest pop culture analysts, and if they are Wendy's, they end up with a finished product that looks a little something like this:
CONTINUED »
They didn't try fooling you into believing a cell phone could pop corn. They didn't try pretending a German town wanted to launch a car across the Atlantic. They didn't try passing off a movie promo as security camera footage of an office freak out. And they didn't try to encourage stalking women.
Instead, Staple's took a hidden camera cue from Burger King to create this series of excellent viral videos — where a guy tries to pay for things with pennies — plugging its back-to-school shopping event. Two more videos worth complimenting, below. CONTINUED »
And so it is, the return of the viral video onslaught. This spot, so obviously from Adidas (promoting its Ajax shirt), is shot in the public square in Amsterdam's Leidseplein district. We're only about six days in, so don't judge the video's mere 60,000 views as a measure of success, or failure, just yet. But it's a clever video, and we enjoyed watching it, and it's the type of thing worth emailing to your friends or posting to Fark. And most importantly, it doesn't leave you looking stupid as you try to guess whether some fanboy orchestrated the whole thing, or a guerilla marketing agency.
As we've noted before, we're growing increasingly suspicious about viral videos. That one with the wild animals? Not yet proven to be a corporate marketing stunt, but we're just waiting for the reveal.
And so arrives this clip. Easily, it could be footage of a friend performing a stupid human trick. Or, as the cynic inside us suggests, it's a spot made by the National Elevator Industry trade group looking to show how safe, and fun, escalators can be.
We've spent many instances of clicking "publish" discussing viral marketing or, as it's known in some circles where buzzwords don't annoy, "murketing." From Levi's uploading a video to YouTube featuring young people jumping into pants to LG's not-exactly-secret-but-very-creepy spot for its Secret phone, the trend of paying very little for a video spot that reaches a much wider audience than a TV spot ever could is a growing one.
Auto maker BMW and its agency GSD&M understood this quite well, which is why they spent a few bucks on a five-day shoot to produce a half-hour mockumentary, in the style of This Is Spinal Tap, about a Bavarian's town attempt to launch a new BMW 1 Series, via ramp, from Germany to the United States.
When the clips began popping up in February, it wasn't long before most everybody called bullshit on them, and linked the spots, part of a campaign called "Rampenfest," to BMW. The car company, however, refused to acknowledge it was behind the project. More so, they even went the additional step and "created a Web site for the fictional events planner, Franz Brendl, and the fictional Bavarian town of Oberpfaffelbachen. Several characters, including the faux film maker, got their own Facebook profiles."
Now, the Wall Street Journal issued a postmortem on the stunt, which argues BMW could've faced significant backlash for its unconventional – though, these days, all too conventional – attempt at reaching younger consumers, by refusing to own the spots when they were found out. CONTINUED »
How long until the Parents Television Council summons a firestorm for over this "viral" spot for LG's new Secret phone? In the ad, a good-looking creep peeks out from his apartment window to capture, using his chic new Secret phone, a lovely sleeping lady next door, who just so happens to be wearing a revealing nighty that she squirms around in. Sure, it's ends up being – spoiler alert! – a dream sequence, but this is the sort of thing they build Law & Order: SVU episodes around.
Click below for LG's less stalker-y alternative clip for their phone. CONTINUED »
It's with great sadness that we can no longer watch videos like this one – entitled "People's encounters with wild animals in daily life" – without immediately jumping to the conclusion that it is a fake and, worse, that it was put together by a creative marketing agency with a product to push.
These viral videos, named for their inclination to spread like the nasty crap that'll force you to the ER at 4am with a burning sensation, are now becoming the territory of corporate America. And lately, these murketing efforts have simply stopped making sense.
Sure, there are the obvious videos, like the one where young people are taped finding various ways to jump into a pair of jeans, courtesy Levi's. And then there's the other end of things, like that "office freakout" video that had almost nothing to do with the project it was promoting (the movie Wanted).
So who's behind this one? It could be the work of somewhere that makes sense, like the San Diego Zoo. Or maybe it's a Frisbee company. (You'll have to watch the video to understand that.)
The now-infamous video of the "security camera catches office freakout," which was exposed as a fraud almost as quickly as everyone assumed it to be, turned out actually to be a viral gimmick for the new Angelina Jolie movie Wanted, from Timur Bekmambetov.
So how does this clip, which shows a cubicle sufferer absolutely lose it in front of his coworkers, fit in with what the movie is about?
Because, as some Russian translating reveals, the movie is about escaping your everyday life, just as the loon in the video wants to. Ehhhh, that's a stretch.
Editorial Director
