We recently had a creative pitch meeting with an AI startup where we presented several ideas for a commercial. Our team had come up with several killer concepts and we felt we had hit a home run only to be told the ball didn’t even reach the warning track.
The problem, though, wasn’t us. The client had pushed the fence about a hundred feet further out.
Everyone on the client’s team loved our ideas except one of the stakeholders who felt none had “viral potential”.
They then quizzed us on how a video becomes viral. Since they were a startup and didn’t have thousands of dollars to put into marketing, they were hoping that this one video would blow up the Internet. They wanted us to come up with a concept that would make them the trend of the year.
Our response at that point was, good luck.
Has anyone figured out how to make a video go viral?
We know there are ways to get views – influencers/celebrities, spend cash, etc, etc – but how exactly do you make a video go viral organically?
For every Fleetwood Mac/Ocean Spray guy, there are thousands of quality videos that no one sees. It’s not just about a clever idea, production value, or gaming the system. There are numerous tips and best practices to boost a video’s chances, but no guarantees.
Sometimes, though rare, videos go viral months or even years after they’re posted for unforeseen reasons.
Often, it’s the product or the brand that drives viewership, not the concept. People will watch your video if you’re somebody.
So when a client — especially a startup that no one has heard of — asks us to come up with a viral concept, our response is that we’ll do our best to make contact, but we can’t promise we’ll hit it 500 feet to dead center.
Our viral videos
Have we had viral videos before? Yes, but it wasn’t because we did anything special. Below are a few examples with brief explanations of how it went down.
Google Maps Street View – Launch Video
We produced this when Picturelab was still called Transvideo. We shot this at our studio in downtown Mountain View, CA, with a green screen and a Google employee in the lead role. It was a last-minute rush and we put everything together in two days. It’s quirky, definitely low production value, but fun to watch. But the reason it went viral is because of the product itself. We take it for granted now, but in 2007, the idea that you can view and navigate a street on the map was mind-blowing amazing. There was so much hype over the product, this video achieved two million views in two days.
NORAD Santa Tracker
Another video we produced as Transvideo; we did all of the 3D animation for this fun promo for Google’s Santa tracking feature. Working with NORAD, Google came up with a fun way for people to see Santa’s journey on Maps. Again, it’s the product and brand driving the clicks.
Blippy Explainer Video
Blippy was somewhat of a controversial product, but it wasn’t anything that would make their video go viral. In fact, the startup did not last long. The only reason this video became anything was that it was featured on TechCrunch in an article discussing the rise of the explainer video. At the time, explainers were a new thing and since Picturelab and Transvideo were pioneers in the genre, there was coverage.
Mint: Unemployment Game
Following the economic collapse of 2008, this tongue-in-cheek look at how unemployment numbers are presented was featured on TechCrunch as well as on Fox News. Our team did an amazing job designing and animating this video, but the reason it went viral was because of the media coverage.
Brazen Explainer Video
This explainer video for the virtual recruiting SaaS reached one million views in a week. How did it happen? Okay, this one wasn’t completely organic but it’s still a great video.
Picturelab is a full-service video production company with offices in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Greater Orange County/Los Angeles region. We don’t promise we’ll make viral videos, but you’ll get an engaging well-produced content that will be relevant to your target audience.
Contact us at info@picturelab.com and we’ll chat.