Airlines are generally wary of delving into politics, but when four Arab countries banned the state-owned Qatar Airways from using their airspace due to allegations of financing Islamic militants, the luxury carrier took the offensive.
Qatar Airways' responding spot, "No Borders, Only Horizons," is this week's top viral video. The narrator opens, saying, "The sky, there should be no borders up here," with the overall message being one of community and connectivity. "We know that travel goes beyond borders and prejudice," the narrator later says.
Nine days after the ban was enacted, Qatar Airways released a statement that noted the global operations were running smoothly and the network was "unaffected by the current circumstances." So, with an unaffected business and a viral video, Qatar Airways seems to be coming out of this would-be PR fiasco mostly unscathed.
Other top viral performers include Porsche's "Le Mans 2017," which highlights the luxury auto company's performance in the French race, and four Samsung ads, three of which have appeared on this chart in past weeks.
As always, the Viral Video List is compiled using both organic views — those initiated by users — and views coming from pre-roll ads.
See the full list below:
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.
**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.
