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

Background: Roller Babies

This spectacularly successful viral 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 anticiptated, 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 viral 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 viral

In France, Evian launched a TV ad the day after the seeding 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 viral 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

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 viral potential 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 seeding 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 viral 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 viral potential 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 viral video seeding 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

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 viral 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 viral 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 virals, 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

Background: Little Gordon

Little Gordon is a series of three films featuring a nine-year-old schoolboy tearing his blond, bouffant hair out as he mimics the foul-mouthed tirades of Gordon Ramsay for hospitality recruitment website Caterer.com. In the first clip, he castigates his mother for his ‘anaemic’ packed lunches, next berates a helpless waiter who can't deliver his food on time, and finally hauls his dinner ladies over the coals about the quality of the sausages. Part the first follows...

Part 2 | Part 3

Challenge: fuel publicity

Caterer.com wanted to boost brand awareness and generate publicity, giving the brand character and connecting it with the diverse range of people working in hospitality. Rebel Virals, who planned and shot the films, asked Unruly to create momentum through organic and commercial seeding that could then be leveraged by PR.

Solution: phased seeding

Unruly executed a three-phase campaign across a range of targeted websites, social networks and video sharing sites over a six-week period. Phasing the release of the clips enabled us to capitalize on interest in the first film and keep the momentum going over the summer holiday season. The seeding activity was supported by a microsite, a YouTube channel, and a Facebook page.

Results: viral success triggers massive press coverage

• 2.4m+ video views
• 312 blogs linking to videos and microsite
• 2,334 Facebook fans

Unruly's activity generated hundreds of blog posts and quickly had the series hitting over 1m views on YouTube. This viral success led to massive coverage in the press, including pieces in The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Daily Star, The Mirror, The Telegraph, The Guardian, Metro, The London Paper, and FHM. It also led to coverage in  trade press titles, foodie blogs and forums including Serious Eats, Food Evaluation, Eat Me Daily, and Food Network Fans.

This was capped by radio coverage on The Chris Moyles Show on Radio 1 and The Michael Ball Show on Radio 2, plus international coverage in the New York Magazine and an interview with Gordon Ramsey on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

Gordon Ramsey himself is now a big fan of the Little Gordon. He screens the films at his own cooking shows and even flew out the child star, Felix, to LA to terrorize contestants in Hell's Kitchen.

Aside: viral marketing to niche audiences

So you're trying to reach dads who are considering booking a trip to a safari park. You'd better get your viral onto CompareTheSafariPark.com then, hadn't you? That way, you can reach all those head-scratching dads and sit back as they forward your film onto all the other dads embarked on that research task, right?

No. No. And no.

People engaged on the sort of task-orientated, goal-driven sites where you think you want contextual placement, aren't super-interested in being side-tracked into watching videos. Even if you could reach this micro audience effectively by media buying, it'd be way too small to jumpstart a viral cascade. And in any case, even if the safari-park-considering dad happens to love the film and is desperate to send it on, how the hell is he any more effective at sending it to other safari-park-considering dads, than all the kids, girlfriends, wives, colleagues and grandparents out there who know what those dads are (supposed to be) doing?

Caterer.com's Little Gordon shows how to do this right. With successful viral campaigns, targeting needs to be baked in at the content creation stage, not tacked on during the media planning process. That way, every opportunity that relies on user invitation, choice, engagement and advocacy will increase the probability of an impact being an impact against the brand's target group.

This is especially true with the cost-per-engagement model of advertising advocated by Unruly. Wherever the film is placed, the only people watching it are those who have chosen to click play based on the still image in the player and the surrounding text. Just as with search marketing, the media buy itself makes use of self-selection to ensure effective targeting and minimize wastage. And this is taken further still when the viewer is deciding who to send the clip onto. Relevance to the recipient is one of the key factors in pass-on, significant enough, in fact, that we identify it as a viral trigger when evaluating digital content. So as long as the content is sufficiently relevant to its intended audience, it's quite possible to rely on a diverse and brand-irrelevant audience to get it there. 

Agency credits

• Creative & Planning: Rebel Virals
• Seeding: Unruly Media

Background: the bootyful game

Given no previous affiliation with football, and lacking the budgets of the official sponsors, Burger King needed to adopt a cheeky, subversive approach in order to hijack buzz around Euro 2008, and used a saucy video with a sting in the tail to provoke debate about the state of the beautiful game.

Challenge: engage mouthy football fans

DLKW and Initiative asked Unruly Media to engage with mouthy football fans, and to use the film to drive viewers to a campaign microsite where they could join in forum conversations and download vouchers for the new Angus 6 Pack.

Solution: digital outreach to top footy blogs

Football blogs are often home to astonishingly vibrant conversations amongst fans, with some, such as The Spoiler, tackling exactly the issues of celebrity and player behaviour that DLKW's campaign was trying to tap into. Unruly Media executed a bespoke outreach programme to the UK's top 100 independent football bloggers in order to situate the viral film in exactly the right conversational context.

Result: true viral hit + business success

• 3m+ views
• 4.6% clickthrough rate
• 20,000+ voucher downloads

Unruly Media achieved 38 high-value, contextually-relevant editorial placements for the video. While these placements generated a significant number of views by themselves, exceeding campaign targets within the first two weeks, they also got people talking about the issues and passing the video on.

Thousands of viewers forwarded the video and dozens of people downloaded the file and re-uploaded it to their own accounts on video sharing sites, thus demonstrating extremely strong affinity with the content and providing an extraordinary quantity of free media, with one fan-uploaded instance to Break generating over 1.6m plays during the 7-week campaign window.

As there was no other advertising or PR activity around the film, the full value of this earned media could be traced back to the seeding and outreach activity undertaken by Unruly.

Viral success, with millions of free views, always gives people a warm fuzzy feeling. But, ask the cynics, so what? Does it shift brand favourability? Does it shift product? Burger King's Bootyful Game shows definitively that this can be done.

The video was extremely effective at driving viewers to the FootballYourWay microsite, with a recorded clickthrough rate of 4.6%. Web analytics on the microsite confirmed that over 20,000 voucher downloads were directly attributable to this traffic, so viral success contributed significantly against the overarching campaign objectives of driving store footfall and increasing sales of the Angus 6 Pack.

Aside: life outside of YouTube

Although YouTube enjoys dominant market share in many territories, it's not the only game in town. In this campaign, Break outperformed YouTube 5-to-1 for earned media. How come? Partly demographics. Break's demographic much more closely reflects the 18-35 male audience this film was targeted at, whereas YouTube's demographic no longer skews in any interesting way from the demographic of the internet population at large. Partly, intensity of competition. With 450,000 videos uploaded to YouTube every day, uploading to sites where competition for attention is less intense can make a lot of sense. Partly, of course, pure luck.

This nicely illustrates the importance of uploading video content to a broad and appropriate mix of video sharing sites as a matter of campaign hygiene, especially where a niche audience is being targeted.

Agency credits

• Creative: DLKW
• Production: Contentment
• Media: Initiative
• Seeding: Unruly Media

Background: St. Patrick's Day Guinness spoof

On St Patrick's Day in March 2008, Pot Noodle released an affectionate pastiche of what was reportedly the most expensive ad ever made: Guinness's Tipping Point, a £10m, high-octane riff on the domino meme.

Shot by Mustard for AKQA on a shoe-string on a North London housing estate, Pot Noodle's Tipping Pot replaced Guinness's grandfather clocks and burning bales of hay with fag packets, traffic cones and wheelie bins, swapping south American scenic splendour for a gritty, oh-so-English urban detritus.

"Our aim was to send a clear brand message - that Pot Noodles are easy to make - while also doing something that would get talked about."

Cheryl Calverley, Brand Manager, Pot Noodle.

The punchline is an inflating sex doll, which tilts a boiling kettle to send hot water down a piece of guttering to - cue pack shot - moisten the awaiting noodles.

Challenge: beat Guinness, fast

St Patrick's Day fell on Saturday 15 March 2008. Unruly was tasked by Cake to drive as many views as possible through YouTube between Monday 10th March and Friday 14 March. The aim was to get the video onto YouTube's most viewed videos page and, crucially, get more views than Guinness's Tipping Point. And to do all this before the end of the week, so that Pot Noodle could press release the fact they'd beaten Guinness on the Friday before St Patrick's Day.

Solution: viral seeding and digital outreach

Unruly kicked off seeding first thing on Monday morning, 10th March, with all activity conducted simultaneously to maximize impact. Bought media was planned in to deliver at the rate of 25,000 plays per day. Placements on classic viral hubs like Viral Video Chart and Popbitch were complemented by posts on satirical news blogs like The Daily Mash and Newsbiscuit and higher volume placements on media and entertainment sites.  At the same time, Unruly reached out to influential bloggers who had posted the original Guinness ad, with a view to earning coverage that would echo further in the blogosphere, generating a substantial amount of free media.

Result: more views than Guinness in 5 days

Media activity delivered over 50,000 YouTube views on the first day. By Friday, Unruly's activity had driven Tipping Pot to 200,000 views, taking it past the 190,000 views enjoyed by the Guinness ad and getting it into the top 40 most viewed videos on YouTube globally. This played perfectly into the PR strategy. The combination of blogger buzz and PR machinery generated significant coverage of Pot Noodle's coup in national and international press, including Sky News, The Telegraph, The Times, The Independent, CBTV and Sydney’s The Age.

The graph below, from YouTube, clearly shows the impact of the seeding activity over the first week of the clip's life cycle. The 213,567 embedded views pegged to 11 March are from blogs and sites embedding the YouTube player distributed by Unruly. On top of which, an additional 31,160 viral views are also pegged to 11 March, the result of links circulating on email, IM and other channels driving traffic back to YouTube.

Aside: (un-)branding content

Ad agencies often ask how heavily they ought to brand their videos if they want to maximize pass-on. Won't overt branding turn off would-be advocates? Surely nobody wants to feel like a corporate stooge? Now Tipping Pot is far from heavily branded. But with it's witty, crystal-clear pack shot at the close of the film, it's as heavily-branded and product-infused as many classic TV spots. Certainly, it's a far cry from the enigmatic, unbranded viral exemplified by Herbal Essences' Bride Hair Wig Out.

The bottom line is that people are totally happy to share and talk about ads...if the ads are worth sharing and talking about. Think Budweiser's Wassup. Think Heineken's Walk-in Fridge. And some of the very best virals, like Blendtec's Will It Blend?, draw their power from a product truth and so promote the goods to a starring role. Conversely, deprecating the brand, just like shooting the film on a shaky hand-held camera or using expletives or C-list celebs, may make you feel that you're 'making a viral' but does nothing by itself to intensify the emotional power of the film, which is the electricity you need to spark pass-on.

Agency credits

• Creative: AKQA
• Production : Mustard
• Post Production: Smoke & Mirrors
• Planning: Cake
• Seeding: Unruly Media
  

Background: pre-launch TV spot

In October 2007, Bacardi launched a buzz-building campaign targeted at key communities in the run-up to the UK launch of its latest TV spot, Bass Bins. The commercial was directed by Alex Rutterford, acclaimed for his work with Radiohead and Autechre, and set to a specially commissioned track by Freelance Hellraiser, a highly-regarded indie producer.

Challenge: stimulate conversation and brand re-appraisal

With 98% awareness across core markets for Bacardi's signature white rum, Bacardi had no interest in increasing brand awareness. The objective was rather to identify the brand's primary target of adventurous, digitally active, 18-29 year old men and women in the UK, and to pre-release the TV spot to them in contextually relevant, social environments where they could view and discuss the commercial amongst their peers ahead of its general release and re-appraise the Bacardi brand.

Solution: UK clubbing communities

Given the nature and credentials of the spot, and Bacardi's close association with live music, Unruly weighted activity to specialist UK music sites dedicated to dance, clubbing and live music, with a secondary emphasis on creative and filmmaking communities whose members were likely to appreciate the craft behind the ad. Unruly's network of UK music seeders, including more than a dozen UK music journalists, critics, bloggers and practitioners, were briefed to personally approach a hand-picked list of over 800 UK blogs and niche sites in order to achieve paid placement in as many credible and influential places as possible.

The activity was split into two phases, with two intense bursts of seeding activity during the first ten days of the campaign. This approach gave Unruly the opportunity to upweight the second phase of activity even more strongly to clubbing sites, where engagement and conversation were highest.

Results: massive buzz around music track

With very strong pick up from a wide range of popular and influential UK clubbing, music and listings sites, including DontStayIn, UKCD, Room Thirteen, The Stool Pigeon, View London and Ents24, Unruly reached 300,000 highly targeted UK views – over double the initial target – within the first week of activity. By the time the spot aired on TV on 15 October, it had already been watched more than 800,000 times on over 100 relevant sites, with 90% of those views occurring in the UK.

More importantly, although viral sharing of the clip was, as expected, only mild, it elicited a wide range of favourable comments on blogs, forums, and video sharing sites. Comments on Unruly's upload to their Viral Video Chart channel on YouTube, below, illustrate vividly the buzz around Freelance Hellraiser's remix of Super Bajo and the clamour to find out where and how to get hold of it. Positive feedback vindicated data from Link survey scores and reinforced Bacardi's confidence in the spot, which was heavily supported on TV throughout the last quarter of 2007.

Aside: production quality

Bacardi's Bass Bins looks and feels like a cinema advert, with its strong focus on spectacular visual effects and compelling audio. Understandably, there was some frustration articulated by viewers on YouTube about the poor quality of the video compression: there is some pixellation during the video and the pack shot at the end of the film is noticeably small and blurry. This film was shot primarily for other media and merely trailered online, but the issue does illustrate the futility of concentrating over much on production quality when shooting web video.

YouTube has, rightly, traded off video quality for widespread accessibility when selecting and developing compression technologies, and the same principle should govern video production. Whatever it is that gives a video its bite, that bite has to be vividly experienceable when viewed in a tiny media player a few hundred pixels high. In this case, the force of the music carried the clip, and Unruly compensated for the short-comings of video sharing sites by syndicating extremely high quality versions of the film to ad archives and creative review sites.

Agency credits

• Creative: RKCR/Y&R
• Production: RSA
• Post Production: The Moving Picture Company
• Audio: Pitch&Sync
• Planning: Unruly Media