Viral Video Award 2009

Tags

viral, Viral Video Award, YouTube

The viral video award 2009 is located within the 25th International Short Film Festival Berlin. 24 viral videos from all over the world are presented and everyone can vote their favorite. The videos are very different to each other.

There is for example this video:

which clearly references guy catches glasses with face, a very popular video on YouTube and also guys backflip into jeans.

Then there are videos which function as advertisement for a company like this one:

And then there are videos with a political message. Some talking about the dangers of smoking, others about the dangers of gen-manipulated food and others again trying to make us aware of some political decision which has a huge impact on our daily lives. For example this one:

marketing in the world wide web

Tags

internet, marketing, viral, YouTube

Internet as marketing platform has been long discovered. When we surf on the web ads are all around us, trying to get our attention from what we were actually doing to the product they praise. But it seems that marketing strategies now even go other ways to reach more people. They have become aware of platforms like YouTube and put their own videos online to attract an audience. In some cases those videos have been very successful, being viewed millions of times in a short period (an interesting question, at this point to ask, is, why do they go viral?).

For example this video, which seems “very innocent” until the very end, when it reveals who’s made it. Even though when more familiar with in this case VW’s usual marketing strategy you can find some similarities as for example the font being used in the video.

viral!

Tags

marketing, viral

Yet again while reading a German online newspaper, I found this very interesting article about a phenomena, that went viral. Supposedly a woman has been dreaming about this man in America and told her mental doctor (can’t think of the correct word) about him and how he gives her tips about her life even though she has never met the guy in her whole life. That guy was also told by some other patients that they were dreaming about this man without actually knowing him. So he sent the phantom picture to his colleagues all over the world and they found out, that patients from them have been dreaming about this man as well. Then the story kind of got viral and is now a much talked of topic in blogs (hehe… see here, I’m doing it as well!) and twitter and other social networks. There are many theories of why so many people are dreaming about that person without actually knowing him.

But the clue of the whole thing is, that some bloggers have already found out, who is the owner of the domain of the homepage: thisman.org ,  it is an Italian guy whose name is: Andrea Natella who is creative director at a marketing company in Italy who is famous for some other campaigns that got viral as well. But one thing that they could not find out yet is: Why. Is it actually an add for something or not?

Why did this video spread?

Tags

viral, YouTube

In todays class we talked about how videos or other media become “viral”, how they spread and become very popular. In small groups we discussed examples. My group talked about the video: Baby giving the evil eye. We tried to find out more about that video and its background and assume that it has been first shown on ABC in the show: Americas funniest home videos, but we could not find out for sure. Fact is, that it has been published on youtube and is very popular there!

But why?

1. We think that first of all the humorous part of the video made people want to share this laugh with others

2. the “Cute-Baby-Factor”

3. we all have been children and so it is something we can relate to