Dance
Saatchi Where’s The Creativity?
T-Mobile Royal Wedding, created by Saatchi & Saatchi
Launched April 15, 2011
JK Wedding Dance, Original
Posted July 19, 2009.
Guess What The Biggest Topic On Facebook Was This Year
The death of Osama bin Laden.
10 percent of all status updates (in English) mentioned Osama bin Laden in the days following his death, according to a Facebook blog outlining the top ten global trends in 2011.
Coming in second was Green Bay Packers beating the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl.
Charlie Sheen was winning in March, if you recall.
Each month engagement centered around the hottest current events. For instance, conversations about the Royal Wedding were really popular during April. Mentions of the marriage shot up 600-fold, according to the Facebook post.
This is what your status updates revealed:
The blog post also looked at the memes that emerged this year.
In it, you’ll see planking — you know, where people lie down in an unusual place. It hit a spike after Max Key, the son of New Zealand Prime Minister John Key uploaded a photo to Facebook, then celebrities gave the meme a second wind, but then it just sort of disappeared.
If you don’t know what “lms” is or “tbh” — then you’re clearly not spending enough time on Facebook.
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See Also:
- Watch Sheryl Sandberg Dance Around The Facebook Phone Question
- Here’s What Facebook’s Management Is Constantly Thinking About
- REPORT: Facebook Buying Gowalla, A Foursquare Competitor
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You Won’t Believe How Big This Profitable 5-Person Startup Is
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/you-wont-believe-how-big-this-profitable-5-person-startup-is-2011-11
We recently met with Adrian Constantin, the founder of video startup TV Links.
TV Links is a video aggregator and search engine, serving up videos from hundreds of sites, similar to US startup Clicker.
It’s not the most innovative business in the world, but here’s what you should know about it: it’s bootstrapped, profitable, it claims 37 million monthly unique visitors, and it has only 5 employees.
TV Links is not just impressive, it’s interesting because it’s a combination of two important trends: globalization, and the extreme capital efficiency of online businesses.
Globalization: the company has developers in Romania, servers in Spain and in the US through Amazon, and most of its users coming from the US, UK and Canada.
Extreme capital efficiency: the company basically outsources everything: hosting, advertising and even some development.
TV Links’ one weak spot is that it gets the vast majority of its traffic from Google and so will live and die by SEO. But the company has ambitious plans; it’s even starting to produce its own original video.
We once wrote that Instagram is the future of startups in part because of its extreme capital efficiency: it has over 10 million users and half a dozen staff (the other reason is distribution via app stores and social media). TV Links is another example of this extreme capital efficiency; unlike Instagram, it gets distribution through the more “traditional” medium of search engines, but unlike Instagram it’s also profitable.
This new reality has broad implications beyond startups. If you’re wondering about the sky-high valuations of companies like LinkedIn or Twitter, part of your calculus should also take into account the fact that it’s now possible to build these very efficient businesses with huge global markets, something which wasn’t possible 10 years ago when “clouds” were still things in the sky and the internet population was counted in millions, not billions.
We will see many more of these ultra capital-efficient, globally-distributed online businesses in the future.
MORE: Why Instagram Is The Future Of Startups →
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See Also:
- VEVO Will Expand Beyond Music Videos — Just Like MTV Did 20 Years Ago
- Watch Sheryl Sandberg Dance Around The Facebook Phone Question
- Here’s What Facebook’s Management Is Constantly Thinking About
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Comcast testing pay-per-package, still afraid of a-la-carte
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/07/comcast-testing-pay-per-package-still-afraid-of-a-la-carte/
[Thanks, Saye]
Comcast testing pay-per-package, still afraid of a-la-carte originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 07 Oct 2011 05:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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iOS has a bigger dev army than Android, but will cross-platform apps rule the day?
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/05/ios-has-a-bigger-dev-army-than-android-but-will-cross-platform/
We oftentimes hear raw numbers of apps bandied about in mobile OS comparisons, but we rarely get any idea of just how many developers are behind the scenes working for each platform. This is the void of knowledge filled by AppStore HQ today, who have gone to their dev directory — claimed to be a complete listing of all 55,000+ coders whose work is currently available for consumption in the Apple App Store or Android Market — and stacked them into neat piles of Apple, Google and Gapple programmers. It’s immediately apparent that single-platform development is the norm (with Apple holding the predictable edge), but AppStore HQ also provides a list of some of the most well known (and well funded) apps doing the cross-platform dance, and suggests that a movement is afoot toward making software available for both sets of users. Then again, the BNET article below points out the difficulties faced by smaller outfits, who might struggle to find the resources required to port their content over and maintain the skills required to be multi-platform, resulting in them sticking to one environment, irrespective of what allures others might throw their way. Give them both a read, we say.
iOS has a bigger dev army than Android, but will cross-platform apps rule the day? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 05 Jul 2010 04:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Viral videos that worked and ones that didn’t
1. Viral videos that worked – videos that made users aware of a product or drove interest in the product
Evian rollerbabies – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQcVllWpwGs
Smirnoff Tea Partay – white guys rapping – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTU2He2BIc0
Blendtec – will it blend? – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRr7N7A4Wc0
Durex – Get it On – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5sTBrs4fhQ
2. Viral videos that didn’t work — videos were remembered for the video itself and not for the product it was meant to market.
Megawooosh
LED Sheep Art
Synchronized Dance in Train Station
Kids Moving Eyebrows to Music
Numa Numa Guy
How to manufacture a viral video sensation and make viral profits – Post 2 of 2
Related: The JKWeddingDance video was real; the viral effect was MANUFACTURED – Post 1 of 2
It was originally discovered and reported that while the jkwedding dance video was real, the viral effect was manufactured by Chris Brown and Sony’s marketing and public relations poeple.
Chris Brown and Sony PR made an unconventional, but really really good, decision to promote a home video on YouTube to drive massive increase in sales and also polish Chris Brown’s tarnished image in the process.
See ReadWriteWeb’s initial article — http://bit.ly/KA3HI
The video of JKWeddingDance was funny and it used Chris Brown’s “Forever” song. Instead of suing them and issuing a take-down order, Sony’s PR department promoted it instead and added an overlay ad to purchase the single from Amazon MP3 or iTunes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-94JhLEiN0
This case reads like a how-to guide to create a successful viral video that drives sales. They (Chris Brown) did everything right.
By promoting the video (instead of suing to get it taken down), they got the video past the first tipping point of X thousand views, after which the video remained on the front page of YouTube which gets about 30 million unique users in a day. Most people don’t look through the ocean of videos on YouTube. Instead, they start with the ones listed on the front page as “most popular, top favorited, or most viewed.”
Then real people continued to amplify the snowball effect — social amplification — and passed along to their friends. This added a viral halo on top of the original promoted views. The viral halo is low to no cost to the advertiser so any profits derived from it is pure viral profit.
For a step-by-step guide to creating a viral video, see
http://go-digital.net/blog/2009/08/how-to-make-a-viral-video-a-5-step-guide
Viral hits can be manufactured. A group which has done this successfully and reproducibly is ImprovEverywhere (see their YouTube channel below). They have MANY YouTube videos which have hundreds of thousands of views, and their latest hit — No Pants Subway Ride – achieved 8 million views in 3 months.
http://www.youtube.com/user/ImprovEverywhere
The JKWeddingDance video was real; the viral effect was MANUFACTURED – Post 1 of 2
originally investigated and reported on Friday July 31, 2009 by Augustine Fou, with Tugce Esener @tesener
Several friends and colleagues had the same reaction when they found out about this video — that it was at such a high view count already and we were late to the party of finding out. Then we did some more digging — digital forensics :-) And this is a case where a viral hit was indeed successfully manufactured. There’s something to be learned from all this – how to successfully manufacture a viral video sensation and make viral profits.
Related: How to manufacture a viral video sensation and make viral profits – Post 2 of 2
Chris Brown is successfully tapping into the viral halo of a funny video that coincidentally used his song.
ReadWriteWeb article on how rights owners (Sony, Chris Brown) can make viral profits on other people using their work instead of suing them - http://bit.ly/KA3HI
The video was real. But promotional activities (possibly/likely paid) created the initial viral effect (led to the tipping point of the viral effect) which then got carried a further by people thinking they were simply late to the party, including myself (e.g. 440k bit.ly clicks and 3k detectable retweets out of the 13M views). The numbers don’t jive.
The viral halo has added 1 million more views to the video from August 1 – August 2. (13.1 M to 14.5 M)
Ten ELEVEN TWELVE THIRTEEN proof points to follow, each with screen shot to illustrate.
1a. anyone notice that the “Forever” soundtrack is remarkably consistent throughout the video as if it were dubbed or added in after the original footage was shot. The sound is too consistent in volume and loudness to have come from a built-in, on-camera microphone. At the very end of the video, once it cuts back to the couple at the altar the sound quality goes back to the echo-y, tinny sound of an on-camera mic.
1b. The “TheKHeinz” user on YouTube was registered on July 19, 2009, the day the video was posted. We usually look for clues like this to detect “plants” by PR agencies. This is an issue of trust — a user “CmdrTaco” on Slashdot has been around the forums for years, made hundreds of posts, and was rated by the community very highly. PR agencies trying to seed stories have to create new user accounts during the PR campaign (recent registration date) and have made no other posts or uploads before (no history).
2. The social intensity detected in all of the top social venues like Technorai, Delicious, Reddit, Digg, etc. indicate there was not enough organic sharing to support a view count of 13 million views in 11 days (updated: 14.6 million today August 2, 2009).
a) Bit.ly shows only 447k clicks on the shortened URL
“At Fortune’s Brainstorm:Tech conference Ashton Kutcher effectively took credit for boosting the views from – in his words – 12,500 views before he tweeted the link – to some 1.2 million views 12 hours later…”
Well, unfortunately he used a bit.ly link which provides public analytics on how many people clicked. Most tweets result in immediate traffic, which then tails off immediately after the tweet falls off the first page. In his case, look at the following bit.ly stats URL and click “past month” to see the peak clicks on July 23. All he can actually claim is that his tweet drove a peak of about 100,000 clicks on that day not 1.2 million 
http://bit.ly/info/Z7vMw
too bad Ashton. next time you make a BMOC claim, be sure to use a non trackable method, so analytics won’t “out” you so easily.
after only 3.5 days of retweets the twitter intensity died off to next-to-nothing; if this were a truly viral video, carried forth by real people (and not by paid PR support and paid media) the retweet intensity would remain high. As of August 21, there are over 21M views on the video and the 505k retweets does not show actual organic support for that number.
b) Twitturly shows only 3 thousand retweets on the YouTube URL itself
c) Delicious shows only 447 bookmarks of the video itself
d) Reddit only shows 673 thumbs up for the video itself
e) Technorati shows only 277 blog mentions of the video itself — this could be undercounting if blogs used URL shorteners. But if you look at the blog intensity results (below) sorted by blogs with most authority the blogs have very little authority (i.e. influence or size of audience).
– these are real indications of interest by real people. The social intensity of the passalong for this video does not substantiate the huge number of views in 11 days.
What we are seeing now is the additional viral halo, as the momentum is sustained by large media outlets reporting on the story — even Google Blog blogged about it (boasting about the success of YouTube advertising in driving revenues). Of course TechCrunch is right that viral videos can be monetized: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/30/youtube-viral-wedding-videos-are-great-for-advertising/ )
3. Twitter shows nothing in the top “trending topics” related to this video – indicating few people are actually tweeting about it — if this video is SO viral (13M views in 11 days) then it has GOT to show up on a scan of social intensity. (see screen capture below)
July 31 (Friday) August 2 (Sunday)
4. The original video was posted July 19, 2009. The people from the video appeared on NBC’s Today Show and danced around Rockerfeller Center on July 25th (6 calendar days after posting). Today Show staff may be great at spotting news, but to get all the wedding party from the wedding to re-enact the dance on the Today Show in 6 calendar days — too good to be true? Hmm…
5. Out of all the wedding videos on YouTube, how did Chris Brown detect this particular one that used his song. @glenngabe noted that there are song detection mechanisms - ContentID - which detect the pattern of the copyrighted song and report that to the rights owners. We know there are hundreds, if not thousaands, or really funny wedding home videos — America’s Funniest Videos has been running for years and years on TV showing funny wedding blooper videos that people submitted to them.
6. ALL TEN of the top viral videos on AdAge’s Viral Video Chart took around 3 – 6 months to achieve full viral effect — not 6 days. See all 10 videos’ stats, as reported by YouTube at the following link. This video has not shown up at all on the list of Adage viral videos.
AdAge Top Viral Videos all take 3 – 6 months to reach full viral effect
7. From @RedW0rm – YouTube Declares Wedding Video a Financial Success – http://bit.ly/9ZUtu
8. also check the velocity of this http://twitter.com/#search?q=jkwedding or this http://twitter.com/#search?q=jkweddingdance notice the tweets are not seconds apart but hours apart. Something that achieved 13M views in the 11 days since posting would show far higher velocity or twitter intensity.
9. For a top-trending topic on twitter, there is usually correspondingly high search volume that is detectable. At first glance, terms related to this viral video like “jkwedding” or “jk wedding dance” all seem to spike. But if you put it against even “Corazon Aquino” (one of the top trending topics NOW on Twitter) those JK wedding search volumes are dwarfed. (see chart below).
10. Google only reports 366 links to the video and most of them are not even important websites (see Alexa blue bar)
11. The video itself has no honors and no stats (yet); YouTube stats are conveniently turned off. Other videos have their stats graphs publicly available.
12. see the fine print in the YouTube description — For more information or to make a donation towards violence prevention please visit our website: http://www.jkweddingdance.com/ – why would a normal wedding video ask people to make a donation towards violence prevention? (see screen capture below), the WHOIS record shows the domain jkweddingdance.com was created 29-Jul-09 — today is 31-Jul-09
Updated: This was circumstantial evidence. A source confirmed that Jill is studying patterns of violence propagation for her PhD. Their choice of charity was their own choice. And the site was set up to help that cause.
Conclusion? The video itself is real, made by those nice people in the wedding. They may not even realize why or how their wedding video went viral (and the tens of thousands of other wedding videos on YouTube did not). On the Today Show, “The couple told Lauer they were surprised at the video’s popularity” (also see NY Daily News article – http://bit.ly/OA3iG )
Related articles:
ReadWriteWeb – Build Profit Not DMCA Suits
WSJ – YouTube Declares Wedding Video a Financial Success
PSFK – Co-opting Viral Hits to Sell More Music
TechCrunch – YouTube: Viral Wedding Videos Are Great For Advertising
Huffington Post – Viral Wedding on YouTube Drives Buyers to Chris Brown Music
AdAge Top Viral Videos: all take 3 – 6 months to reach full viral effect
Samsung Sheep Viral Video – 2 months
T-Mobile Dance viral video – 5 months
Cadbury Dancing Eyebrows Viral Video – 4 months
Geico Numa Numa Guy viral video – 3 months
McDonalds Filet-o-Fish Viral Video – 5 months
etrade baby took 4 months to reach full viral
Super cameleon viral video took 3 months to reach full viral
Durex bunnies viral video took 3 months to reach full viral
Dennys banana pancake viral video took 4 months to reach full viral
Lewist Hamilton Grand Prix took 2 months to reach viral
the shape of the views curve is different for a NON-viral video — it just accumulates views over the years.
link back to the original article showing 12 points that demonstrate why I think the JK Wedding video has a manufactured viral effect.
Viral videos are cool and all, but most of them don’t drive sales.
Samsung LED Sheep – how do I even buy an LED from Samsung, if I wanted one?
T-Mobile Dance – not sure exactly what it means or how it is related to cell phone service, but it SURE was cool!
Cadbury Eyebrows – cool, and forwardable video. but what does Cadbury make again? So I can go buy some of whatever they make? ;-)
etc. etc. you get the point…
the only videos (below) that actually have anything to do with the product are Filet-O-fish, condom bunnies doing their thing, and Denny’s banana on pancakes.
Source: http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=135717
| Last Week | Brand | Campaign | Agency | Current Week Views* | % Change in Views** | Watch the Spot | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | Samsung | Extreme Sheep LED Art | The Viral Factory | 2,866,364 | +39% |  |
| 2 | 2 | T-Mobile | T-Mobile Dance | Saatchi & Saatchi, MediaCom | 876,946 | -15% |  |
| 3 | 4 | Cadbury | Eyebrow Dance | Fallon | 636,418 | +27% |  |
| 4 | New | Geico | It’s the Gecko/ Numa Numa | The Martin Agency, Horizon Media | 442,653 | New |  |
| 5 | 5 | McDonald’s | Talking Filet-O-Fish | Arnold | 378,488 | -2% |  |
| 6 | 9 | E-Trade | E-Trade Baby | Grey, New York | 323,100 | +17% |  |
| 7 | New | Ray-Ban | Never Hide | Cutwater | 304,970 | New |  |
| 8 | 8 | Durex | Get It On | Fitzgerald & Co., SuperFad | 235,290 | -18% |  |
| 9 | Back on chart | Denny’s | Nannerpuss | Goodby, Silverstein & Partners | 178,359 | -3% |  |
| 10 | 6 | Vodafone | Lewis Hamilton and the RC Office Grand Prix | Outsider | 171,123 | -49% |  |
|
Source: Visible Measures
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Digital Consigliere
Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.
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