• 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

• Brand Xbox
• Project Alpine Legend
• Service Video seeding and social media 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 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

• 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 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

• Brand Caterer.com
• Project Little Gordon
• Service Video seeding
• Date 29 July 2008
• Headline 2.4m+ plays led to massive media and trade press coverage

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

• Brand Burger King
• Project Football Your Way
• Services Video seeding and digital outreach
• Date 26 May 2008
• Headline 3m+ views

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