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

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