“Can you make me a viral?”

One of the interesting analyses from our comScore study on the persuasiveness of user-gen video was this one by Social Media Influence.

“…here’s a strong retort for those moments when the brand manager asks of the agency: “can you make me a viral?” Instead, it turns out, offering your customers a superior product and a compelling narrative has the potential to be even more persuasive than a handsome man on a horse.”

“Maybe it’s too early to boot the creative team, but the findings of the study do suggest that marketers have been underestimating the persuasive power of user-generated video.”

The conclusion drawn here was that there is more to user-gen video for marketers than skateboarding cats.  Viral videos became a standard agency product because they were something agencies and brands understood:  eyeballs…a lot of them…and quick!  They knew how to price that, they knew how to count that, and they knew how to sell that.  They slammed a new medium into the template of the old.

So what is the template of the new medium?

A surprising study by Next New Networks and Youtube shows that entertainment video created for the online platform actually does better online than video created for other mediums, such as TV shows.  It seems that viewers appreciate and respond to the differences when content is tailored to the platform they’re watching it on.

Applying that to a marketing video…if a TV commercial was made to interrupt an experience on a lean-back platform, why do we think that same video will work on when viewers are searching for content on a lean-in platform?

I believe that consumers online crave a different kind of video than that which is available on and created for television.  They want information & searchability (web 1.0), they want control & engagement (web 2.0), and they want personal connection (web 3.0).  Agencies, brands and publishers should focus on how to merge those strengths of this platform to develop the right video content for this new space and move beyond using the old video content for this new space.