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Viral Video Chart: Top Spots Get Boost From Offline Buzz

What People Watched the Week of June 8, 2009

by Abbey Klaassen
Published: June 18, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- This week's No. 1 spot belongs to XBox's Project Natal video, whose 1,090% growth over last week is a record for the chart.

What drove the increased views? First of all, the body- and facial-recognition technology, which lets you control a video game without a controller, is pretty compelling -- so it's not surprising the demo has been worth its share of pass-along. But Project Natal also got an enthusiastic endorsement from Jimmy Fallon when he featured it on his show June 10. Mr. Fallon, "The Office's" John Krasinski and "True Blood's" Stephen Moyer played "Ricochet" and "Burnout Paradise."

Meanwhile, the "Beer and Porn" video from Bud Light made its debut in the No. 6 spot. The video has been out since February but for some reason took off last week. Visible Measures, which tracks the video traffic for the chart, did a little investigating. Wrote Matt Cutler, VP-marketing and analytics: "We do not believe this ad ever saw TV air time and seems to have been quietly leaked back in February on the web. Subsequent copies were uploaded intermittently ever since, but the campaign appears to have taken off at the end of May when it was covered by Time magazine."

More evidence that offline mentions can drive online views?

	Last Week	Brand	Campaign	Agency	Current Week Views*	% Change in Views**
1	9	Microsoft Xbox	Project Natal	World Famous	2,478,490	+1090%
2	1	Carl's Jr	How to Eat a Burger (Portobello Mushroom Six Dollar Burger)	Initiative, Mendelsohn Zien	1,663,988	-50%
3	2	Nike Basketball	Most Valuable Puppets	Wieden & Kennedy	1,598,328	-42%
4	3	NBA	Where Amazing Happens	Goodby, Silverstein & Partners	504,335	-43%
5	5	Cadbury	Eyebrow Dance	Fallon	338,037	+2%
6	NEW	Bud Light	Beer & Porn	DDB	312,997	NEW
7	8	T-Mobile	T-Mobile Dance	Saatchi & Saatchi, MediaCom	246,624	+11%
8	6	Vodafone	Make the Most of Now	Ogilvy & Mather	243,528	-26%
9	10	Dos Equis	The Most Interesting Man in the World	Euro RSCG	228,118	+22%
10	4	Gillette	Shaving Tips From Gillette	BBDO, Proximity Canada	192,500	-63%
Source: Visible Measures The Visible Measures Top 10 Viral Video Ad Campaigns Chart focuses on brand-driven viral video ads that appear on online-video-sharing destinations. Each campaign is measured on a True Reach™ basis, which includes viewership of both brand-syndicated video clips and viewer-driven social video placements. The data are compiled using the Visible Measures Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing repository of analytic data on more than 100 million internet videos across more than 150 video-sharing destinations. Note: This analysis does not include Visible Measures' paid-placement (i.e., overlays, pre-/mid-/post-roll) performance data or video views on private sites. This chart does not include movie trailers, video-game campaigns, TV show or media network promotions, or public service announcements. View-count results are incremental by week. *Indicates percent change in views compared with the same period the week before. To notify Visible Measures of an upcoming video ad campaign, or for an end-to-end assessment of your campaign's overall performance, please contact Visible Measures directly.

1 Comment

By zbgoodwin | washington, DC June 18, 2009 02:01:05 pm:

Very interesting what Carl's, Jr. has attempted. I just read an excellent account of the campaign at YMC: http://bit.ly/11H9aX. They're right that the videos are brilliant, but the distribution channel is absolutely worth investigating.

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