But while the media player may have changed (from TV to PC), the same rules still apply: Creativity rules and reach still counts. Creativity is mission-critical to getting people to watch your video online, probably more so than on TV, and a “post and hope” strategy not only risks your video never being discovered, but is likely to reduce the overall number of views your video will receive.

Human Nature Underlies Viral Campaign Success

If a viral campaign is to be effective, people must be willing to work on behalf of a brand. Therefore, marketers must ensure that people are inspired to send the ad to other people. The basic motivation for people to share ads or links is the age-old desire to connect with others. People pass along ads for the same reasons they pass along jokes, anecdotes, and photos. It is a means of staying in touch, of making a connection, of sending the message “I’m thinking of you, and I hope you’ll enjoy this.”

A “post and hope” strategy not only risks your video never being discovered, but is likely to reduce the overall number of views your video will receive.

Ads, however, can have value that goes beyond the personal connection represented by a comment or photo. Ads can become a unit of “social currency,” transmitting the message “I’m cool and special because I’m hooked into this new, fun, interesting stuff.” But if either of those messages is to register, the content must be appreciated by the recipient.

Two Components of Viral Success

In 2007, Duncan J. Watts co-authored a paper titled “Viral Marketing for the Real World” with Jonah Peretti and Michael Frumin. In the paper, Watts, who is a professor of sociology at

Columbia University and the author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age(W. W. Norton, 2003), finds that the size of a viral audience is determined by the scale of the initial seeding of the video combined with the “reproduction rate” (that is, the degree to which people are willing to pass the ad on to others).

In marketing terms, “seeding” represents the initial reach of the video, and the reproduction rate represents the creative power of the ad — that is, the degree to which people engage with it and feel compelled to pass it on. The authors demonstrate that the greater the initial reach of a viral video, the greater the number of “bonus” views it will achieve (irrespective of creative power). Simply posting a video and hoping people will find it is a long-term strategy at best. If a video is to stand a chance of going viral, it must be seeded in enough places to transcend the disparate set of sites and personal networks that exists online.

Creativity is mission-critical to getting people to watch your video online.

In their paper, Watts et al. focus primarily on the “media” component of viral marketing. They say that success is rare and that predicting the likely success of a viral campaign “is extremely hard, if not impossible — even for experienced practitioners.”But practitioners can only predict success if they understand how well an ad resonates with the target audience.

Investigating Creativity’s Role in Viral Viewing

Last year my colleagues Duncan Southgate, Nikki Westoby, and Graham Page set out to discover the creative factors that allow ads to go viral. (The details of their findings will be published in the May edition of The International Journal of Advertising.) Their analysis was based on behavioral viewing data from YouTube for 102 ads (71 from the U.S. and 31 from the U.K.), which had been tested as finished films using our Web-based Link methodology.