viral video

For those who are unfamiliar, TheLadders is a job search site that competes with CareerBuilder and Monster within the specific category of $100k + jobs. You may remember them from the entertaining and well executed ad campaign that features a tennis player whose game is suddenly taken over by a jungle of ill-suited players running amuck on the court, swatting at tennis balls and ruining the game. TheLadders is supposed to eliminate that feeling from a job search by targeting high end candidates with high end opportunities.

Their most recent campaign was developed in July of this year and launched just this week. It features an inconspicuous stone pillar in a public park with $100,000 in cash displayed beneath a glass case. No explanation is given as to why it is there or what its purpose is. The full video can be seen on my YouTube channel and is embedded below. I say it can be seen on MY YouTube channel because TheLadders failed miserably in their social activation of this campaign (and in fact it appears I am not the only one to give them an ‘F’ them for doing so). The video is artfully created and highlights all the right aspects of consumers interacting with the campaign. From a content production standpoint it is spot on. Check it out:

From a promotional standpoint, however, the campaign was announced through a blast email to TheLadders’ marketing database and that seems to be just about it… No viral video promotion, no social bookmarking, no blogger outreach, no visible real estate on the homepage of TheLadders.com, no NUTHIN… In fact, the only real mention of the campaign in social channels is where TheLadders’ agency uploaded the video to their own channel. At the time of writing this blog post that iteration of the video had received 74 views. The iteration on my own personal channel (embedded above) had received 212 views. Yikes. What does that mean, my friends? You guessed it… This campaign was a social media Hail Mary. Despite being a seemingly media and consumer-savvy company TheLadders has made their first attempt to breach social media marketing and it is nothing more than a Hail Mary. What classifies it as such? Let’s look at the steps in TheLadders’ marketing strategy for this campaign:

1. Execute cool and intriguing social experiment.
2. Produce a great viral video highlighting the outcome of the experiment, coupled with the messaging we want to deliver.
3. Cross our fingers.

As you may have guessed, Step 3 is where the campaign falters. This campaign had big potential. BIG. But no matter how viral your content is it REQUIRES promotion. Otherwise it is nothing more than a Hail Mary. Now, to their credit… What did TheLadders do RIGHT?

1. Concept – the concept is great. It’s intriguing, it’s engaging, it’s arousing. It delivers the right message for their brand.
2. Google AdWords campaign – Google is still king. Period. TheLadders was smart to drive users to their campaign using Google AdWords. The only problem? The AdWords campaign requires prior knowledge of the campaign – general search terms like “Job Hunting” and branded search terms like “The Ladders” still only return the homepage. Terms like “$100k Experiment” send consumers directly to the campaign, but then of course… If those users already know about the campaign, why spend the $0.30 per click??
3. Viral video production – hats off to the agency that created this video. Job well done. It’s 3 minutes long – just about as long as consumers can tolerate for a branded video, it intersperses appropriate messaging with the attractive content and edits it in a consumer-friendly fashion. Most importantly, it doesn’t beat us over the head with the messaging.
4. Leverage the email database – TheLadders.com is perhaps a little guilty of abusing their email database. I’ve personally opted in and out several times because of the over-proliferation of announcements being attributed to their CEO, but in this case they were wise to launch the campaign to the audience most closely aligned with their brand first.

Anything that I missed? Let me know what you think in the comments. I would love to applaud them for enabling the “Send to a Friend” function, but making the page/video shareable by email only?? How 2003. Let me know what else you think TheLadders did right, I’m always looking for reasons to give a pat on the back!

A recent guest post on TechCrunch by Dan Ackerman-Greenberg, co-founder of a viral video marketing company, touched a nerve with readers. He shared “secret strategies” behind many of the viral videos that appear on YouTube and elsewhere on the Internet. What is striking about the post is that he was willing to share so unapologetically some controversial tactics used to promote viral videos.

Among the shady YouTube tactics Ackerman-Greenberg outlined are the use of misleading titles, creating fake user accounts, creating false controversy by posting phony comments back and forth, deleting comments they don’t like, paying bloggers to post videos and more. The post generated about 500 comments, mostly decrying these tactics.

First, people shouldn’t be surprised that these tactics are being used by some to push viral videos. The ultimate search for marketers is to reach the elusive youth demographic. The potential to reach such a huge audience makes us all consider how to get our message to them.

So, back to the angry response of many TechCrunch readers …

What are they expecting? Don’t most videos that appear on the most viewed page have some agenda? Of course they do. One comment by “rico” says it well: “i know a lot of people would like to keep their youtube experience pure - heaven forbid their viewing of cat videos and snl skits be tainted by marketing, but don’t get angry just because someone figured out how to make money in a creative way.”

YouTube and other social media resources are a great way to reach a lot of people. We think that it is just not worth it to use unethical tactics. It’s a good rule of thumb in PR that if something could embarrass your client if found out, then don’t do it.

Ultimately, good content is key to any viral video’s success. If done correctly, hundreds of thousands of potential customers may view your message. But that is not really the end goal, is it? While stupid videos like this one mentioned by Ackerman-Greenberg may generate a lot of views, we doubt that it is really going to influence the company’s bottom line. It is hard to correlate a large number of views with actual actions taken by consumers, voters, etc. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth creating good viral videos. If the video encapsulates your brand well and inspires people to act, it can have a huge impact.

Greenberg states, “You simply can’t expect to post great videos on YouTube and have them go viral on their own, even if you think you have the best videos ever. These days, achieving true virality takes serious creativity, some luck, and a lot of hard work.” Yeah, that is probably true, but we believe that there are more ethical ways of “greasing the wheel.” Doing it the wrong way just gives our profession a bad name and ultimately hurts our clients.

Let us know what you think. Post a comment or two.