Our business is evolving fast and we were recently commissioned to create a 60 second video that would go viral to create a promo that would create a fun loving brand image for a new social media tool – Shared Diaries.  Lots of people talk about viral – but here’s some stats courtesy of YouTube expert Josh Rimmer: 50-70% of Youtube videos get less than 100 views, 10% get less than 1,500 views, only 3% get more than 25,000 views, only 1% get 500,000+ views. Our video for ShareDiaries video has now got over 26,000 hits.

Sure, there are a few 15 year old genius presenters out there but for the most part YouTube viral videos relies on luck – thousands of kids with flipcams means 3% will capture purely by accident something that’s amazing and it goes viral. To deliberately create a viral video to a commercial brief is another matter. Big companies spend millions – using TV adverts to bolster campaigns and also cheating by involving crowds that mean they instantly get several hundreds people tweeting their friends becuase they happend to be in St Pancras Station when a viral was being filmed. So how did we do achieve this on a budget a fraction of the size of most agencies?

1. employ a top award winning comedy script writer – in this case, Kim Fuller, who is a true Prince of comedy and has been writing this type of viral creating material for years.
2. employ top actors to do the voice overs, in this case Jess Robinson and Steven Kynman
3. Use excellent sound studio – quality sound is everthing
4. then add some sharp creative imagery and editing

For distribution, follow the rules on setting up the video properly on YouTube, don’t just upload and pray it works, there’s a lot you can do to parameterise and promote to get maximum searchability – if you want some good tips, see Josh Rimmer’s web-site. That sets a strong foundation, but you can also employ specialist services that galvanise distribution with existing social media audiences and typically you’ll need to invest £1,000 per 10,000 viewers.

Remember content is king, the best distribution will backfire if the video does not entertain and make people love your brand. Humour works but is a hard won by commodity – the key to success is to harness comedy genius and a production company that will work like an advertising agency to get a detailed brief to feed the comedy writer. They will use a consutlative approach to get the very best brief and distill the brand into a viral concept. That’s what we have proven we can do for a small fraction of the big Ad agencies!