July
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
How Megan Fox got the equivalent of $50 million of Superbowl ad spending – for FREE! — the marketing of Megan Fox
godaddy superbowl ad spending led to sharp spikes in search volume every February for the last 5 years straight. Other advertisers who spent on Superbowl ads have similar lift in search volume from the TV advertising.
Source: Google Insights for Search
If you believe that lift in search volume indicates interest and intent and if you consider that each 30-second ad cost $3 million in 2009 (WSJ: NBC Super Bowl Ads to Cost $3 Million) and assuming GoDaddy’s ad did not air more than once, they spent $3 million to get their ad in front of a TON of people and to get people’s attention. Those people who saw the ad and were interested enough to take action went online and searched for more information by typing godaddy into search (see lift in search volume during February of each year) .
If we assume that it took $3 million to generate a certain lift in search we can use multiples to calculate the media dollar equivalent of any lift in search — for example, if godaddy spent $3 million to get X lift in search, then a 2X lift in search would have required $6 million of media (in a very very simplified back of the envelope estimate; it usually would cost more than 2x to get that lift) — i.e. it would have cost at least $6 million in superbowl ad media dollars to achieve a 2X lift in search volume.
So, if we now compare search volume on megan fox side by side with godaddy search volume, we will see that in Feb 2009 Megan Fox was indexing at 21 while godaddy was indexing at 12 (this is normalized to a scale of 0 – 100). So search volume on megan fox indicates she was getting the equivalent value to $6 million of super bowl media ad spend – FOR FREE — roughly 2X the search volume of godaddy in the same time period.
At the peak of her search volume in June 2009 (corresponding to the release of Transformers 2: The Revenge of the Fallen), she was indexing at 100 and godaddy at 7. This is 8x the index of godaddy of 12 during the Feb 2009 time period when they were airing their superbowl ads. This implies that she was getting the search volume that would have required the equivalent to a $24 million super bowl ad spend to achieve — again for FREE!
If you want to research futher, use the following link to bring up Google Insights for Search to see relative search volume
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=godaddy%2Cmegan%20fox&cmpt=q
In February 2008, Megan Fox indexed at 8 and GoDaddy at 8. In 2008, Superbowl ad spots cost only $2.7 million — so she had the equivalent search volume as a paid advertising spending $2.7 million on a Superbowl ad.
In 2007, Godaddy indexed at 6 during Feb 2007 Superbowl. Megan Fox indexed at 43 during the July release of the first Transformers movie — this is an 8X multiple on Superbowl ads that cost $2.6 million — or $21 million
So the perfect “product placement” of Megan Fox in the two Transformers movies garnered her nearly $50 million worth of advertising based on search volume equivalency. This does not even take into account her sustained and increasing search volume, compared to most advertisers’ search volumes which drop right back down to pre-ad levels once the ad is finished airing.
Despite massive increases in advertising, the biggest beer brands see massive drops in sales
Beer is yet another commodity and category that is being decimated by better quality alternatives. The means of production and distribution are no longer controlled by a very small number of big companies. Consumers find attractive alternatives in micro-brew beers or local beers. They have the means to access them (online) and have the product shipped directly to their homes. So no matter how much advertising the big companies do, if their product is just not that great, they will continue to lose customers to alternatives. The “lime” version of Bud Light was said to cannibalize sales of regular Bud Light. And rightly so, consumers are looking for a better product.
Source: http://adage.com/article?article_id=138141
Fourth of July Holiday: Bargain Brands Gain, but Big Spenders Bud, Miller Lite and Corona Tap Out
By Jeremy Mullman
Published: July 27, 2009
Despite a flurry of new and improved ad pushes for the country’s leading brews, the days leading up to Independence Day, usually the biggest-selling period of the year for the category, led to gruesome sales declines vs. the same period last year. Sales for Anheuser-Busch’s Bud Light and Budweiser plunged 7% and 14%, respectively, in grocery, convenience and drug stores during the two-week period ending July 5, according to scanner data from Information Resources Inc. Miller Lite suffered a 9% drop. The big importers were hurt badly too: Corona marketer Crown Imports watched sales decline 6% to 8%, while Heineken and Diageo each saw double-digit drops.
Occasions and Holidays Drive Movie Box Office Sales, Not Advertising
Taking the top box office results for each of 52 weekends from the past 10 complete years (1998 – 2008; Source: IMDB.com) we see consistently that occasions like Valentines, Memorial Day, July 4th, and Thanksgiving show increased movie going activity. People have more time during these holidays to go to the movies and Valentines is a date+movie occasion. Also, during the summer, many people go to the movie theatre to escape the heat so there is an overall hump every year during the summer months — from Memorial Day to Labor Day.
People go out during Valentines, Memorial Day, July 4th, and Thanksgiving. And they still spend what they planned to spend — 2 tickets for movie — they didn’t buy 2 more tickets and see a second movie on the same date or holiday weekend. If they had several good movies to choose from (often, they don’t), they would choose to spend the finite dollars on the one movie they really wanted to see. The overall movie spending “pie” did not increase much, if any, year over year.
1998 $4,055,194,733 n/a
1999 $4,253,601,768 5%
2000 $4,496,554,005 6%
2001 $5,003,433,737 11%
2002 $5,489,974,199 10%
2003 $5,581,797,720 2%
2004 $ 5,697,299,530 2%
2005 $ 5,524,566,579 -3%
2006 $ 5,660,826,625 +2%
2007 $ 5,968,027,963 +5%
2008 $ 5,887,193,490 -1%
The chart below shows a red line which is the average of all 10 years. The 10 thin blue lines are the annual lines from1998 – 2008, inclusive and these are plotted as actual dollars. They come out right on top of each other.
Movie advertising, which runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars a year, has failed to noticeably increase the overall spending year-round or even during specific times. The chart below shows the differentials (difference between an annual line and the 10-yr average line). These all hover closely in the +$50M and -$50M band. The amplitude of the 10-yr average (red line) is larger than $50M in the summer hump — implying that the average change in movie ticket sales due to normal seasonality is larger than the change in amplitude caused by ALL movie advertising combined.
And the summer “hump” is due to actual demand (people going out to movie theatres, some to escape the heat) not due to advertising. The only effect of advertising is to share-shift from one movie to another — the total spending remains consistent and even seasonal variations are consistent — a “zero-sum game.”
All-Time USA Box office
Source: IMDB.com
| Rank | Title | USA Box Office |
| 1. | Titanic (1997) | $600,779,824 |
| 2. | The Dark Knight (2008) | $533,316,061 |
| 3. | Star Wars (1977) | $460,935,665 |
| 4. | Shrek 2 (2004) | $436,471,036 |
| 5. | E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) | $434,949,459 |
| 6. | Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace(1999) | $431,065,444 |
| 7. | Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) | $423,032,628 |
| 8. | Spider-Man (2002) | $403,706,375 |
| 9. | Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005) | $380,262,555 |
| 10. | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King(2003) | $377,019,252 |
| 11. | Spider-Man 2 (2004) | $373,377,893 |
| 12. | The Passion of the Christ (2004) | $370,270,943 |
| 13. | Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) | $367,614,540 |
| 14. | Jurassic Park (1993) | $356,784,000 |
| 15. | The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) | $340,478,898 |
| 16. | Finding Nemo (2003) | $339,714,367 |
| 17. | Spider-Man 3 (2007) | $336,530,303 |
| 18. | Forrest Gump (1994) | $329,691,196 |
| 19. | The Lion King (1994) | $328,423,001 |
| 20. | Shrek the Third (2007) | $320,706,665 |
| 21. | Transformers (2007) | $318,759,914 |
| 22. | Iron Man (2008) | $318,298,180 |
| 23. | Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) | $317,557,891 |
| 24. | Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull(2008) | $317,011,114 |
| 25. | The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring(2001) | $313,837,577 |
About Me
Tags
advertisers
advertising
amp
brand
business
click
com
company
content
cost
day
example
Facebook
gawker
google
information
interest
link
marketing
mdash
number
online
page
post
print
Product
search
search volume
site
social marketing
social networks
something
Source
thing
time
tmpPost
traffic
twitter
use
user
video
volume
way
Web
year
Recent Posts
- iPad on Sale today – only 24% will buy, 76% will wait and see
- Change or Die [Music]
- A Predictable Failure: Kimberly-Clark Offering Kleenex Hand Towels
- 1024-bit RSA encryption cracked by carefully starving CPU of electricity
- 975
- Apple vs Microsoft vs Sony [Graphs]
- This Is Why that Amazing NASA Earth Image Looked So Familiar
- 972
- Please Euthanize This Big Boy Already – How Lack of Innovation Killed Another Giant
- 969
Popular Posts
- HP Mini 311 Nvidia ION Netbook Hackintosh'ed
- Facebook advertising metrics and benchmarks
- What is Web 3.0? Characteristics of Web 3.0
- social media benchmarks
- Samsung 52 inch HDTV $9.99 at BestBuy - purchase receipt below (6:21a eastern time August 12, 2009)
- How to manufacture a viral video sensation and make viral profits - Post 2 of 2
- The JKWeddingDance video was real; the viral effect was MANUFACTURED - Post 1 of 2
- The Grand Unified Theory of Marketing(tm) - Digital String Theory
- Evian baby viral video has much higher ROI than Etrade baby superbowl ad
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) - A Metrics "Sacred Cow" That Should be Slaughtered?
Recent Articles by Dr. Augustine Fou
- The ROI for Social Media Is Zero - ClickZ
- What's Wrong With the Net Promoter Score - ClickZ
- The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing No Longer Apply, Part 2 ...
- How to Do Social Marketing in Heavily Regulated Industries ...
- The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing No Longer Apply - ClickZ
- 11 Most Popular Experts' Columns of 2009 on ClickZ - ClickZ ...
- December 27, 2009 - January 2, 2010 - ClickZ - News and ...
Pages
Archives
- March 2010 (10)
- February 2010 (21)
- January 2010 (12)
- December 2009 (4)
- November 2009 (2)
- October 2009 (14)
- September 2009 (6)
- August 2009 (19)
- July 2009 (34)
- June 2009 (11)
- May 2009 (4)
- April 2009 (6)
- March 2009 (13)
- February 2009 (32)
- January 2009 (25)
- December 2008 (1)
- October 2008 (1)
- November 2007 (1)
