Ok. As we all (all 7 of you if my guesses are correct) know I don’t update the blog that often.
My inspiration for the grand and clever posts that I dream of writing has been gone lately, but today I’ll at least give you something to read.
I’m thinking about virals today, we are doing yet another Philips project and I’m on some kind of assistant/intern duty. Scanning things making easy Photoshop cut and paste jobs, image hunting and so on.
There are two Dutch freelancers who are doing the creativity bit and frankly their ideas are good. Not excellent, but good. However most of their ideas don’t seem that digital, their only digital idea I’ve seen has by far been the best but the majority of their stuff is just TV spots put on the web and expected to go viral all by themselves.
I don’t think it works that way. I’ve been trying to dissect some virals of the last few years and hopefully it has made me smarter and better. I’ll talk about two virals you shold have seen and one you might not have noticed at all.
Never Hide: Never Hide hits the spot in so many ways, it’s my favourite viral movie clip and has been since I saw it the first time. Two guys doing something sort of impressive and clever together. It’s still clever when you see trough the illusion and understand how they do it. This really nails what youtube is about, if we look at several memes on youtube we can se that a lot of them is about doing something unexpected with a friend, sibling or something like that.
The strapline Never Hide is written in the dust of a car window in the end and that’s all the product information we are provided with. A quick internet search tells the curious viewer (if there was any) that Ray-Ban is behind the stunt.
SFW Porn: The most important part with this one is the sender, Diesel and to keep their brand values up. Diesel has had a lot of good TV spots during the years. Like this one, with crazy japanease people, and look at the date! 1994 people didn’t know that the Japanese was crazy back then, we only thought they where polite and effective.
But in this day and age of the internet they need to take it a sep further, people don’t watch the same things on youtube as they watch on TV.
Going for shock value everytime is not a good strategy, Celebrating your companys 30′th birthday with shock value is exellent.
The Cake Is A Lie: A viral site for the game Portal (the game won buck loads of awards) where the visitor navigate trough a text based site, to find himself applying for a job or something at Aperture Science. Answering a long list of strange and meaningless questions eventually gave the clue to write a specific command in one of the text screens. this provided a security camera screen of the staring area in the game. Nowadays there is a screen at the entry page showing the viewer that this has something to do with a computer game but before release it wasn’t there.
Portal is a game with loads of nerd appeal in it and the site hit the target audience just in the right spot to build an even bigger hype. The game was a hit in the whole gaming world but struck hardest at the nerd crowd. The ending song Still Alive was played on 4Chans /b forum on entry and Felicia Day, new crowned queen of all nerds (The Guild, Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog). sang it on PAX 08.
And whats my final thoughts?
It’s all about knowing the medium, knowing your audience and pushing the border just a little bit.