• 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 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

• Brand Bacardi
• Project Bass Bins
• Service Video distribution
• Date 01 October 2007
• Headline 800,000 views build clubber buzz around remix

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