adidas Originals - Star Wars Collection

• Brand adidas Originals
• Project Star Wars Collection
• Service Digital Outreach and Mobile Advertising
• Date 14 Jan 2010
• Headline #1 on Viral Video Chart

Background: Star Wars Collection

In January 2010, adidas Originals partnered with Star Wars to launch the über-retro, geektastic sneaker-fest that is the Star Wars Collection. The 60-second video below, featuring David Beckham, Snoop Dogg, Daft Punk, a Darth Vader cape, and an awful lot of red mist, kicked things off on 14 January.

Challenge: reach 18-24 year old men

Carat wanted the video to reach 18-24 year old men on trend, geek and movie sites. A reasonable enough request, though many such sites skew older than the desired target audience, so some care and attention was needed during the media planning process.

Solution: digital outreach and mobile advertising

Unruly Media executed a bespoke outreach programme for Carat, identifying and personally contacting bloggers who would connect with the content and present it to their readers in an engaging, natural way. Old skool, yes! But somehow thoroughly appropriate. We threw in some Star Wars fans for good measure: how could we resist? In addition, Unruly distributed the video on handpicked, youth-orientated mobile video applications to ensure a heavy skew towards a young 16-24 audience.

Result: #1 most shared video globally

• #1 on Viral Video Chart
• 897 blog posts, 2,028 tweets and 14,559 Facebook shares
• 1.2m plays

Unruly's outreach programme was extraordinarily effective at generating editorial placements on sites that occupy the hipster / geek intersection, including Prozac Champagne, Popwhore, TrendLand, and GeekTown and some fabulous personal sites like game designer Steve Odgen's blog. As you can see from the links, these are high quality, permanent placements generating real conversation among the sites' readers and contributing in a lasting way to search engine visibility.

It's interesting to see how the impact of our digital outreach rippled out across the blogosphere. Over on Geekologie, it took 22 separate reader tip-offs - yes 22! - before a post went up on 20 January, 6 days after we commenced digital outreach activity. But when it did, it generated a load of conversation in the comments and contributed over 34,000 views to the brand's upload on YouTube.

The quantity of reposts and retweets propelled the clip to the top of the Viral Video Chart, even beating Coke's Happiness Machine for several days and helping the video on its way to over 1m organic plays, the first real threshold of social video success.

Best of all, as the YouTube data shows below, the video did, even after allowing for a lot of spread, a surprisingly good job of hitting its target of a male, 18-24 UK audience.

Aside: the power of editorial placement

We've said it before and we'll say it again. The whole point of commissioning branded content is to move out of the ad space in the gutters and the margins of the page and into the content space where people spend their time and attention. To eschew worthless ad impressions that no one actually sees in favour of editorial space that provides a massively more engaging media environment, not just because people actually see it, but because people listen to, respect, and respond to the authorial voice of the writer who's bringing the content to their attention.

So far, so polemic.

But get this. On TrendLand, 2.29% of people who watched the video emailed the video to friends, on GeekTown, the recorded clickthrough rate on the video was 5.56%, and on GeekSpeak, a massive 14.29% of viewers shared the video on Facebook, Twitter or via email.

These rates aren't just impressive. They are one or two orders or magnitude higher than sharing and clickthrough rates generated outside of editorial placements and light years from the sorts of engagement rates generated by rich media banners.

You need this force to be with you.

Agency credits

• Creative: Sid Lee
• Media: Carat
• Distribution: Unruly Media

The Sun - Best Handheld for 40 Years

• Brand The Sun
• Project Sun 4.0
• Service Social media activation, mobile advertising
• Date 23 November 2009
• Headline So successful it transferred to TV

Background: best handheld for 40 years

To celebrate The Sun's 40th Birthday, Glue produced two tongue-in-cheek videos capitalizing on the continuing buzz around the iPhone and presenting the tabloid as a lightning-fast, highly usable handheld device that's joyously free of connectivity issues.

Challenge: reach newspaper buyers

Glue and i-level asked Unruly to reach an adult, newspaper-buying audience to reinforce the persisting benefits of paper, plus a secondary audience of transient twenty-somethings.

Solution: activation on Twitter

We thought Glue's execution would go down a storm amongst digitally-savvy journalists and on tech-focused blogs. Accordingly, we activated the campaign primarily on Twitter, capitalizing on its extremely strong skew towards journalists, bloggers and gadget-lovers, hoping to generate enough retweets to surface the campaign organically.

Our Twitter strategy embraced the full trinity of owned, earned and bought media. Placements on Unruly Media's own Twitter profiles and placements earned by digital outreach were bolstered by paid activity on profiles owned by people within the campaign's demographic.

To reach the secondary audience of transient twenty-somethings, we also executed a mobile video advertising campaign across youth-orientated entertainment applications installed on Nokia and Sony Ericsson smart phones.

Result: social media success

• 1,858 total retweets
• 5.2% clickthrough and 24.6% sharethrough rate on Twitter
• Coverage on Boing Boing, Gizmodo, and Engadget
• Front page of Digg
• #1 on Viral Video Chart

As we expected, the campaign flew on Twitter, rapidly receiving enough tweets to propel it to the top of the Viral Video Chart. From there, it was quickly picked up by some of the world's biggest blogs, including Engadget, the second most influential blog in the world after The Huffington Post, Gizmodo, the third most influential blog globally, and Boing Boing, the seventh most authoritative blog on the planet according to Technorati.

On 30 November, a week after we launched the campaign, our upload of the YouTube video made the homepage of crowd-powered news site Digg, earning another 10,000 views in less than 24 hours.

The campaign was so successful online that The Sun decided to air one of the videos as a 60 second spot during the X Factor final on Sunday 13th December, 2010.

Agency credits

• Creative: Glue
• Media: i-level
• Seeding: Unruly Media

Evian - Roller Babies

• Brand Evian
• Project Live Young
• Service Video distribution and social media monitoring
• Date 03 July 2009
• Headline 45.2m views set new world record

Background: Roller Babies

This spectacularly successful social video campaign created by BETC Euro RSCG, Paris, reprised Evian's famous Water Babies TV spot from 1998, swapping synchronized swimmers for roller skating babies. Roller Babies was the key creative asset in Evian's 'Live Young' campaign, showing the sensational effect that drinking Evian can have on the body.

Challenge: Evian's first global campaign

'Live Young', Evian's first ever global campaign, was set to launch simultaneously in France, UK, Germany, Belgium, Canada, US, Russia and Japan. In France, where the launch of the new babies creative was eagerly anticipaated, activity was heavily supported by TV. In other markets activity needed to focus solely or primarily on digital channels, and would not benefit from the same collective memory.

Solution: social media activation and global tracking

In order to build buzz and whet appetites, Unruly launched two teaser videos two weeks before the official launch of the Roller Babies video. Baby Moonwalk and Baby Break Dance both set the scene and harked back to Evian's Water Babies, jogging memories and creating a mood of anticipation.

For Roller Babies itself, Unruly Media focussed a significant amount of activity on Twitter, complementing the YouTube homepage takeovers that launched the clip in the eight key territories. We simultaneously launched the video from our own Unruly Media profile on Twitter, our Viral Video Chart profile, and harnessed other Twitterati and Twitter-focussed sites and apps such as Tweetmeme. Picked up and retweeted within seconds, Roller Babies benefitted hugely from Twitter's ability to cross national boundaries and surface real-time trends, leading to the fastest first million views we've ever seen.

In order to track the global spread of the campaign, Unruly fingerprinted the video file - taking a sample of its audiovisual DNA - and deployed web-tracking software to crawl 30 billion web pages looking for matches. This enabled us to aggregate views, comments, and tweets for over 2,000 uploads of the video and to report back in real-time on the campaign's true reach and social media impact.

Result: biggest social video evuh

• #1 on YouTube
• #1 on Viral Video Chart
• World Record for most viewed ad online
• 61.4m views to date
• Over 54,000 comments and tweets
• Over 440,000 Facebook fans

We formally validated the view numbers to Guinness and, on 09 November 2009, the Guinness Book of Records officially declared Roller Babies to be the most viewed online advertisement ever with 45.2m views. By December 2009, this number had increased to 61m views, when measured across all two thousand offcial and unofficial video uploads. The succes of Roller Babies has created a halo effect around other Evian content, with even the teaser videos, Baby Moonwalk and Baby Break Dance, and subsequent 'Making of' videos achieving millions of views apiece.

According to research from Nielsen, over 80% of people who saw the clip in France or the US considered discussing it and two thirds wanted to share it with friends. Much of this conversation and sharing happened on Facebook, where Evian has attracted over 440,000 fans, and on Twitter, where the video was retweeted over 16,000 times.

Here's what peole close to the campaign had to say.

Michael Aidan, global brand director, Evian:

"The combination of seeding and posting the film worldwide on YouTube has helped us reach well beyond our expectations: the most viewed video ad on the web ever. Even more spectacular is the spontaneous relay TV channels around the world gave to this ‘web sensation’ and the 350 equally spontaneous remixed versions of the spot that have now reached millions."

Rémi Babinet, founder of BETC Euro RSCG and global creative director of Euro RSCG:

"The Evian campaign has succeeded in proving that creativity can at the same time be very qualitative and very universal. In a climate of crisis and general gloom this advert shows that it can play the role of a positive spur in a depressed market."

Alexis Thobellem, Director of Social Media, BETC Euro RSCG:

“The performance of the Roller Babies ad exceeded all of our expectations and quickly spread beyond what we could accurately measure internally. Even after the campaign was well-underway, Unruly Media was able to help us benchmark Roller Babies’ performance against the most-watched online video ads of all-time and assess its total online reach."

Aside #1: TV versus social video

In France, Evian launched a TV ad the day after the distribution activity commenced. Five days after the campaign was launched on TV, Nielsen research found that 95% of those who viewed the Roller Babies video online had not seen the ad on TV. This clearly demonstrates the ability of online video to extend the reach of traditional media. It also neatly illustrates the way in which social spread is driven primarily online and not by media spend in other channels.

Aside #2: ripping, remixing, and replication

One of the most important ways successful content spreads online is by fans ripping the file and re-uploading the content to their own personal media channels. This is quite different to and demonstrates a much higher level of involvement than simply grabbing and reposting the embed code. It's also much harder to track.

How can a brand monitor the spread and success of its content as it's ripped and remixed across the social web? It's not enough to embed tracking pixels into the video file, as such tracers are stripped out as soon as the file is ripped or re-uploaded. The best approach currently available is a combination of massive-scale web-crawling and automated analysis of the audiovisual DNA of the source video files using computer vision algorithms, also known as video fingerprinting.

Using just such an approach for Evian, we discovered 2,177 separate uploads of the Roller Babies video across hundreds of video sharing sites. Our data showed that 44.4% of all views - that's 27.3m views - were generated by uploads outside the brand's official YouTube channel.

Agency credits

• Creative: BETC Euro RSCG, Paris
• Media: BETC Euro RSCG, Paris
• Seeding: Unruly Media

Xbox - Alpine Legend

• Brand Xbox
• Project Alpine Legend
• Service Social Video Advertising 
• Date 01 April 2009
• Headline 400% uplift in visitors to Xbox.com

Background: Alpine Legend, April Fool

Xbox wanted to make some noise about their sponsorship of the Snowbombing Festival in Austria and highlight just how much fun you can have with Xbox live. AKQA responded with a trailer for a new Xbox game, Alpine Legend, a music game for yodelling fans complete with full-sized alphorn.

Challenge: amaze the masses

Xbox and AKQA asked Unruly Media to get the video out to a mass audience and to create as much buzz as possible, targeting 18-24 casual gamers, not just Xbox's die-hard fanbase.

Solution: April Fools' Day prank

Unruly Media launched the Alpine Legend trailer on April 1st with a blizzard of media activity. Although the spoof game trailer was inherently funny, the social appeal of the clip was massively amplified by its newsworthiness and relevance as an April Fools' Day prank, so it was critical to create instant momentum. Gaming communities were approached with the prank late on 31 March. This was supplemented by one day take-overs on high volume social media applications within Facebook and Bebo.

Result: massive media coverage

• 191,613 plays in 24 hours
• #1 on YouTube
• #5 on Viral Video Chart
• CNN coverage reached 200m households worldwide

Tactical outreach to gaming sites quickly caused a stir amongst the otherwise cynical gaming community. Some people even thought it was a real game, especially since Xbox launched a very official-looking game page on Xbox.com.

Unruly's carpet bombing of social networking sites and Gen Y hangouts helped news about the bizarre new yodelling game explode, quickly reaching mainstream media like The Times, Fox News and CNN, and exposing millions of people to the almighty alphorn. Alpine Legend was Fox TV's favourite April Fool on their gaming news section, the second favourite prank on the Times, and among the top 10 April Fools on the Huffington Post and Kotaku, plus it also made the front pages of Eurogamer, Game Trailers, Brand Republic and Campaign. Broader TV coverage on CNN International extended the reach way beyond our targets, hitting up to 200 million households worldwide.

By April 2, the YouTube upload had received 74 honours, including most viewed in a number of countries and channels, and reached number 5 on the Viral Video Chart.

All this buzz caused traffic to Xbox.com to quadruple, with the game page temporarily surpassing the home page for volume.

Aside: the virtues and pitfalls of perfect timing

On any other day, the social trigger for Alpine Legend would be humour alone. By launching the video on April Fools Day, high news value and relevance were added to the mix, massively increasing the appeal of the campaign. With a target window measured in hours, this is a high-risk / high-reward strategy, requiring a well thought out media plan and flawless execution. Get it wrong, and the campaign becomes laughable for all the wrong reasons.

The need for perfect timing illustrates vividly the benefits of paid media within a social video distribution plan. PR to mainstream media and digital outreach to niche gaming communities might have got Alpine Legend the sort of buzz and coverage achieved here. But being able to prank hundreds of thousands of people on the morning of April 1 ensured that much of the positive noise reaching the ears of bloggers and journalists was authentic word-of-mouth, making high quality coverage significantly more likely.

Agency credits

• Creative: AKQA
• Media: Universal McCann
• Seeding: Unruly Media

T-Mobile - Dance

• Brand T-Mobile
• Project Dance
• Services Social media advertising and digital outreach
• Date 16 January 2009
• Headline 18m+ plays drive extraordinary WOM and contribute to 22% sales uplift

Background: Dance

T-Mobile’s riff on Frozen Grand Central, a spectacular 2½ minute film in which 350 choreographed dancers disrupted and confounded commuters at London's Liverpool Street station, first aired during Celebrity Big Brother on a Friday night in mid-January, just 24 hours after the Improv-Everywhere-inspired event.

Challenge: support cross media activity

In the words of Richard Huntingdon, the Saatchi planner behind T-Mobile's ambitious 'Life's For Sharing' strategy, this campaign was "depth-charged with bought media": TV, outdoor, digital outdoor, radio, online. But although the film was rushed out within hours of the disturbance, creative for most media channels was not available until the end of the following week due to production constraints. Consequently, MediaCom asked Unruly to compensate for this potentially quiet period by making the film ubiquitous online.

Solution: flash mob fans and Facebook

Unruly Media quickly got the film out to flash mob fans, who had been carefully identified and qualified over the previous week. Hundreds of bloggers embedded the clip, which clocked up 1m views on YouTube over the first weekend. On Monday morning, Unruly Media took over popular video sharing applications within Facebook to make the video as easy as possible to re-discover and as frictionless as possible to forward on to friends and colleagues during the week-long hiatus before online creative became available.

Results: genuine word of mouth phenomenon

• 18,572,973 plays
• 20,649 comments
• #1 on Viral Video Chart
• 22% sales uplift

The clip spread like wildfire: for every person viewing the video, it was, during first-level pass-on, forwarded to an average of 3.6 people, leading to 1.8m forwards within Facebook alone. More than 50 T-Mobile Dance groups formed on Facebook, often to organise similar events at UK rail stations.

Dance topped Unruly Media's Viral Video Chart and stayed in the top 5 for over 2 weeks, holding even Obama’s inauguration speech at bay. By July 2009, the video had amassed over 16m views, elicited 16,000 comments, and become the 46th most viewed video on YouTube of all time. A copy-cat event at Antwerp station, itself generating over 4m views, cemented T-Mobile’s place in the train-station-flash-mob meme.

T-Mobile’s YouTube channel was, during the second quarter of 2009, the most viewed commercial channel in the UK, and the second most viewed globally. And store footfall in January was the highest ever for T-Mobile, with handset sales increasing by 22% during launch week.

"This new media strategy represented a brave move for us and was a resounding success. Not only did we capture the imagination of the nation but we also delivered for the business."

Lysa Hardy, Head of Brand and Communications, T-Mobile UK

Aside: what drives pass-on?

Dance demonstrates a nuanced and sophisticated appreciation of the types of content that people want to share and the motivations driving them. Eschewing overused content triggers such as sex, shock, and humour, Dance taps into people's propensity to feel touched, inspired and uplifted. Perhaps appropriately for The Lovemarks Company, 'love' and 'like' were the two most frequently used words in comments about the film. (The top 100 words are presented in a weighted list below).

It's no coincidence that dance recurs as a motif through many social video successes. The Hamster Dance, Where the Hell is Matt?, Evolution of Dance, CPDRC Inmates' Thriller Tribute. All attest that the socially infectious dimension of dance transmits well through video. T-Mobile's Dance harnesses this power and, like many other successful dance videos, adds visual spectacle through careful choreography to heighten the impact.

So far, so good. What's great is the way in which Saatchi's event doesn't try to start from scratch or, like a defensive teenager, pretend to have no influences. As a very clear response to Improv Everywhere's Frozen Grand Central, Dance also participates within a greater online conversation and helps to perpetuate if not co-create a successful, virulent meme.

It's true, too, that Dance's unfettered, expansive optimism captured a certain aspect of the zeitgeist in late 2008 / early 2009. With Obama-mania sweeping much of the English-speaking world, itself either part-cause or part-consequence of a mood-swing away from the vicious cynicism manifested in much of 2007's pop culture, the financial crisis and ensuing credit crunch created suprising updraughts of reckless, Depression-era good humour. The world's gone to shit. We might as well party. Smart brand stewards were on hand to help organise them.

Agency credits

• Creative: Saatchi & Saatchi
• Media: MediaCom
• Seeding: Unruly Media