This year's top 10 viral videos didn't shy away from using celebrities, emotion or humor to hook viewers for 90 seconds or more.
Shell's animated clean energy campaign grabbed first place, garnering 262 million views after launching this September.
Despite marketing troubles, three Samsung ads held top 10 positions. Samsung's humorous "Why?" campaign used celebrities to ask why their phone wasn't able to do what they wish it could do. It came in second place with 225 million views. Other Samsung ads that made the cut included a Galaxy S7 video ranked that ranked fourth place, and the company's 10th place Olympic-themed video that attracted 103 million views.
British department store John Lewis ranked third place with its "Buster the Boxer" holiday ad, starring "Buster," a family dog who longs to jump on the backyard trampoline that a couple gave their daughter for Christmas. It acquired 219 million views after a November release.
Other top 10 winners included two campaigns from Nike and videos from Purple and Victoria's Secret. YouTube Rewind, the company's annual recap video, was ranked 2016's seventh most viewed video, pulling in 154 views in just over a week.
The Viral Chart, courtesy of Visible Measures, used both "organic" unpaid views and paid ad placements throughout 2016.
Ad Age's Viral Video Chart, powered by Visible Measures, focuses on brand-driven social video ad campaigns. Each campaign is measured by True Reach, an MRC accredited metric that includes views from brand-driven and audience-driven social video clips. The data are compiled using the patented Visible Measures platform, a constantly growing repository of analytic data on hundreds of millions of videos tracked across hundreds of online video destinations.
Note: This analysis includes all publicly available video views on branded video content. This chart does not include movie trailers, video game campaigns, TV show, or television network promotions. View counts are incremental by week.
Campaign ranked by views from January 1 - December 14, 2016
**Indicates percent change in views compared with the same period the week before.
To notify Visible Measures of an upcoming social video ad campaign, please contact Visible Measures directly.
