Man, crazy stunts. You just can’t go wrong with them! Yes, this is totally fake. But how cool is it?

It’s actually a ‘viral video’ for Gatorade. Not sure how the drink fits into this, but I just love watching it again and again. And sharing with you. Ergo - she’s viral, baby!

[Thanks, AdPulp!]

Tags: viral, video, advertising, gatorade, funny

This video was all the rage around the Interwebs last week. Turns out, it was a fake. It’s a commercial to promote the director, Timur Bekmambetov’s new film! Crazy, huh?

But man, it sure got me thinkin’… I bet you could to a lot of neat stuff with that ’security camera’ look. Which reminds me, this band made an entire music video with other people’s actual security cameras!

Tags: viral, video, commercial, creative inspiration

This music video for The Bird and The Bee goes to show, you don’t even need a camera these days to make a cool video. Oh, I know, I know, they used their web cam, but still…

Tags: creative inspiration, video, music, mac, viral

Who doesn’t love a good musical? And a bit of family drama. Well, if Meat Loaf is in it, you can’t go wrong! That dude’s a barrel of laughs. But if you can’t get him, the musical-cum-commercial is always a hit.

[Thanks for the tip, Leah!]

Tags: creative inspiration, commercial, advertising, meat loaf, go phone

I just can’t help myself from sharing this with you guys:

I guess my point here is that in this day in age you can make ads out of anything. It’s all about the mashup these days - taking bits and pieces of culture and media and slapping them together in a whole new way. Awesome.

Tags: viral, video, advertising, creative inspiration, mashup, barack obama, bollywood

Leave it up to our buddy Nalts to create one of the funniest ad parodies I’ve seen in a long while. Like many a Mac fanboy, I was glued to the live blogging from yesterday’s Steve Jobs speech at MacWorld. Then I went to the Apple site and watched all the videos they had, one of which is the new commercial for the MacBook Air, “The world’s thinnest notebook.” Here’s Nalts’ old, clunky laptop trying to get thin. So funny! (Oh, and that reminds me, don’t forget to head over and join our Slim-Fast assignment going on now!)

Tags: nalts, macbook air, commercial, advertising, funny, parody

Armed with a user-made fan video with over a million views on YouTube, McDonald’s enters the wild world of consumer-generated advertising with this brilliant little piece of work promoting the wonders of Chicken McNuggets:

We’re very excited to see one of the world’s top brands using this kind of advertisement. Sure it’s raw, but so cool and funny! This piece is getting airtime on major networks all over the country. If it’s good promotion for McDonald’s, folks, it will be good promotion for your brand, too. CGA, FTW!

Tags: video, viral, advertising, mcdonalds, funny, success, mcnuggets

Everyone wants ‘em, but are they just a fad? Christina Goodman mulls over the prospects for viral video campaigns in the future over at MediaPost. She’s fairly confident the trend will continue in light of the current user-generated video world, but does suggest proceeding with caution.

In this age where consumers have more and more choices, content and advertising are being controlled by what consumers want, how and when they want it, forcing marketers to rethink their old ways of communication. In some respects, viral advertising is a way of reaching consumers that gives them ultimate creation and viewing control — including the media platform they choose to watch it on, whether it is viewed on the Internet, or using their iPod or mobile device. Shifting focus and control to the consumer does not guarantee a promising outcome, particularly where viral videos are concerned, and marketers need to consider both the positives and negatives of launching a viral marketing campaign.

I think she’s got a lot of great points in this piece. However, I also believe that our cultural consumption gravitates increasingly to the current fluidity of media sharing and this fervent hurricane of portable video cultural conversation. The urge to inject brand messages into this chaotic mediasphere is too strong now to resist and will continue getting stronger the more eyeballs are drawn to it. The fact is ‘viral video’ is the way it’s done, and it’s no fad.

Tags: viral, marketing, advertising, video, trends

In one of the more painful exchanges about viral videos, a young student at Stanford and ‘viral video consultant’ began with a lengthy post on TechCrunch about how to game YouTube. People were furious, for various reasons. Next, he posted a reply in which he backpedaled on a few of the claims. Now, after all the noise surrounding these posts, he’s interviewed on CNN. I have never seen a more awkward and lame discussion of ‘viral video‘ in my life (they show Dramatic Chipmunk 3 times in a row!). But here you go, it’s news (sort of):

Tags: viral, video, cnn, techcrunch, youtube, news

Well, we didn’t think it would take this long, but Internet viral sensation Tay Zonday turned his viral hit song and video “Chocolate Rain” into a pretty… um… well, it’s out there… commercial for Dr. Pepper’s new soda beverage they’re calling Cherry Chocolate, er, Rain. OMG.

Tags: tay zonday, cherry chocolate rain, dr. pepper, viral, video, advertising

The Wall Street Journal’s Raymund Flandez delves into marketing with online video today in a piece called “Lights! Camera! Sales!: How to Use Video to Expand your Business in a YouTube World“. He highlights a number of successful video series that help market small businesses of all shapes and sizes. A bunch of our favorites made the article (MAKE’s Weekend Projects and Will it Blend?), but it introduced us to some new ones as well (Val’s Art Diary and Free Range Root Beer).

For all the hype this article lends to the viral video trend, Nalts points out that it’s not perfect. He’s up in arms about a few of the specifics they mention, and he’s right on the money in his critique. Make sure to read it. He went ahead and wrote up his own excellent list of pointers to using web video to grow your business. For example:

To get a decent ROI, you need to keep your costs down. Otherwise you’re going to have a tough time capturing measurable value that offsets a $50-$500K pilot. You can dip your toe in the water for just thousands simply by partnering with known “weblebrities” who often promote products and services for a small fee, and already have an established audience. A few grand with a weblebrity gets you a video, their halo effect, and nearly guaranteed views of 10-100K. That same amount will get you an afternoon of a large agency fees.

Nalts is always the great resource for all things viral. Check out his blog for more tips like these:

‘Course, in this day in age, you could always just cheat.

Tags: video, advertising, business, promotion, marketing, guerilla, nalts, wsj

We’re getting a lot of Nalts Love this week! He mentions us a couple times over on his blog Will Video For Food. First, he calls this very blog as one of the ‘must read‘ blogs about video on the web. Thanks, Nalts!

Then, in a post detailing “The Advertising Agency’s Five Stages of ‘Online Video’ Grief“, he took some time to write up a great summary of the panel discussion he lead with Neil at the ad:tech conference last week. Here’s a list of five simple steps to getting up to speed on viral video advertising:

1. Pay attention to social media, industry changes and viral videos that help market. There’s a lot you can learn from positive and negative example. If you catch your agency staff watching online videos at work, don’t stop them (unless it’s porn). Find out what they’re watching and why.
2. Hire someone who understands this medium. At first it might not feel like headcount you can justify, and you may want to find a subcontractor or consultant. But as a product director myself (yeah I’ve got a day job) I’m going to look elsewhere if I don’t believe your agency has a clue about the impact of online video. Nothing makes me giggle like an agency that boasts that they are pioneers because they made a brand page on MySpace or Friendster, or had a viral video that got viewed ten thousand times.
3. Begin to experiment with lower cost and adaptive forms of video content. The next time you do that “big shoot,” get some footage you can use in other forms. It could be as simple as footage from a decent high definition camera, but be sure to arrange the rights with your models and the shoot’s director (who will probably grow quite irate at this prospect).
4. Pitch your client on doing something experimental online — before they find someone else with a more robust and compelling story. Don’t stop with online-video ads — try creating entertaining content that subtly markets. There is no shortage of inventory for paid promotion, but that’s just one arrow in your online-video quiver.
5. Partner with amateurs who have existing audiences and online “street cred,” and they’ll keep you from doing anything that will be repulsive to skeptical online viewers who have ADHD and love the power of stopping ads and lambasting blatant promotion. If you’re brave, approach some online-video “weblebrities,” (like top YouTubers or amateurs that have had success on other sites). This is a lot of work, so if you want a more turnkey approach hire a specialist to manage it (xlntads, for example, is brokering relationships between big brands and promising amateurs).

Of course, we’d emphasize #5!

Tags: nalts, advertising, xlntads, video, viral, blogging, adtech

Liz Gannes over at NewTeeVee has a great write up today about “Mastering Viral Video Advertising in 3 Easy Steps“. That’s a joke headline, though. As we all know, it’s not that simple. There is no proven formula. But what it does is a wrap of of an panel she moderated with three companies - Tubes Networks, GPS Maniac and Personality Hotels - who experimented with ‘going viral’. She writes, “Some of their spots went viral, some of them didn’t — but what did they learn?” Check it out.

But if you’re dead-set on finding the viral success formula, though, you might want to check out our friend Charles Trippy’s new DVD, “Viral Video Fever“. He’s one of YouTube’s more popular stars, and he’s hoping this DVD will help him become the Next Internet Millionaire.

Thanks, Nalts for pointing this out to us!

What’s that? You still don’t understand how to go viral? Well, first you should hook up with Gabe and Max. They know what’s up!

Tags: video, viral, trends, advertising, marketing, gabe and max, liz gannes, charles trippy, nalts

AdPulp points out a great quote from marketing guru Seth Godin today:

Word of mouth is a decaying function. A marketer does something and a consumer tells five or ten friends. And that’s it. It amplifies the marketing action and then fades, usually quickly. A lousy flight on United Airlines is word of mouth. A great meal at Momofuku is word of mouth.

Viral marketing is a compounding function. A marketer does something and then a consumer tells five or ten people. Then then they tell five or ten people. And it repeats. And grows and grows. Like a virus spreading through a population. The marketer doesn’t have to actually do anything else. (They can help by making it easier for the word to spread, but in the classic examples, the marketer is out of the loop.) The Mona Lisa is an ideavirus.

Tags: viral, seth godin, adpulp, advertising, marketing

All over the blogosphere today, we’re seeing this report. Blendtec Blenders, the brand behind the now famous viral video campaign “Will it Blend?” have reported that since the making of their videos, online sales of their blenders have gone up five-fold!

Proof. A powerful message doesn’t have to come from a big-budget production!

The famous iPhone blend: