Advertising in the digital age.
Monday, August 10, 2009 by Katie
As people increasingly turn to ‘timeshifting’ televisual technologies (ie. MySky, online streaming) where ads can be filtered or skipped, new forms of advertising are needed, hence the importance of viral advertising, notably the way in which its success is furthered by social networking media can have in this.
Here are some of my favorite examples of viral advertising:
1) Carrot vs Rabbit: Brilliant, totally captures the essence of viral advertising.
2) A parody on the infamous wedding dance clip (link!), this video was funded by printing company Ricoh (I know their logo doesn't appear in the clip, but see this link for info).
Creator of the above clip Max Rosen, runs a course at New York University on viral video production. He identifies some characteristics of viral advertising to ensure its success and generation of profit in these demanding times such as:
- Make people go "Ha-Ha!" or "Wow!"
- Make them short and sweet.
- Using seeding of blogs etc to create a word of mouth buzz.
It's this final point which is interesting, as social media is key in this, especially the notion of 'liking' on Facebook, meaning no longer having to forward the clip in an email. However it would be worrying if advertisers began to exploit social media (ie the ads in banners on Facebook), invading our pages.Let's hope there will be no need for Steve Mann's advertisement filtering glasses now!
