July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

A new study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau says that most of our mobile video watching actually isn’t very mobile at all.

Sixty-three percent of video-watching on mobile phones, the study said, happens right at home, sweet home. And 36 percent that is right in the front of another, bigger screen: a home theater system, laptop, or a tablet. In other words, the researchers say, mobile video isn’t a way to kill minutes wasted in lineups or something to do when there are no other entertainment options, and this has implications for what kinds of video content brands and entertainment companies should focus on creating.

“We need to see mobile as a primary screen for on-demand consumption, not as an afterthought,” digital agency 360i’s president David Levin said in a statement.

The IAB did not speculate on why supposedly “mobile” video is mostly consumed at home, but this makes a lot of sense. Not only is your phone the most personal device — the go-to device wherever you are — but video consumes a lot of bandwidth. Data costs money when on cellular networks, and it’s typically much slower than on your own home Wi-Fi.

What do we watch? Almost exclusively entertainment content, strongly trending to music videos. There’s a reason Gangnam Style is the most-watched video in history.

• Music videos (45 percent)
• Movie trailers (42 percent)
• Tutorials/How-To’s (41 percent)
• Funny short video clips (37 percent)

What we share with others, though, is a little different: Funny clips and music videos are the most likely to be shared; tutorials and movie trailers are not nearly as viral.

Of course, the Interactive Advertising Board is interested in the use of mobile video for marketing purposes. How do people feel about mobile video ads?

• 53 percent said they’re OK with mobile video advertising
• 48 percent said video ads should relate to the video content they’re watching
• 44 percent remember seeing video ads (10-15 second spots are the most memorable)

The small but intensive study — just 200 participants — lasted for two weeks.

photo credit: mark sebastian via photopin cc

Red Bull leads all brands in viral videos, according to a new study by viral video creator Goviral. Google came in second, followed by Disney and Nike. And it seems that mocking iPeople works for Samsung: The Korean company slid into fifth position on the list, six places ahead of bitter competitor Apple.

The Old Spice guy still has some life in him, years after becoming the face of corporate-sponsored viral videos. Old Spice came in sixth position, ahead of much larger and richer companies such as Intel, Pepsi, Visa, and Microsoft. The brand currently has a staggering 308 million aggregate video views on its YouTube channel.

To build the list, Goviral reviewed four factors: the raw number of views a company’s videos received, the company’s Interbrand ranking, which shows how valuable its brand is, the engagement that the uploaded videos stimulate, and a subjective measure of quality, innovation, and relevance.

Here are Goviral’s top 10:

1. Red Bull
2. Google
3. Disney
4. Nike
5. Samsung
6. Old Spice
7. Prada
8. Coca Cola
9. Nintendo
10. Adidas

There are clearly different strategies for getting top slots.

Google and Apple tend to do product videos that demonstrate features without trying overtly to be viral, although Apple’s new iPad mini ad mixes in a little of the unexpected, and Google’s Field Trip video is gripping and poignant. Old Spice relies on humor. Red Bull focuses on amazing exploits and Rube Goldberg machines that trigger wildly improbable chains of causality, often ending in a product shot.

Here’s a perfect example — Red Bull’s latest YouTube video, which has already captured 75,000 views in its first 18 hours:

In car brands, the Germans appear to have a lock on viral videos, as BMW, Volkswagen, Mercedes, and Porsche claimed spots 12, 13, 15, and 22, respectively. Interestingly, Kia won 28th position, ahead of Ferrari, Ford, and Audi, showing that a young and aspiring brand can still break through in social media.

Some of the surprises include SAP, Accenture, Siemens, and GE, all of which made the list in spite of perhaps not being the most exciting or obviously viral-type brands.

For the full list, with rankings, check out Goviral’s report.

Image credit: Goviral

Conway’s latest viral video fields ideas for how to use the latest tech innovation to improve the local transportation system, parking, public safety, the police department, public Wi-Fi, and more.

Conway describes the video as a “gift to San Francisco,” and it’s already making its rounds on the Internet, which isn’t surprising, given that the stars of the new video boast a combined 4.2 million Twitter followers.

In addition to Dorsey, creator of Twitter and founder of Square,  Conway convinced Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter, Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky and Jawbone’s CEO Hosain Rahman to star in the video.

“We wanted to produce a video to bring the tech community together and raise awareness about Proposition E,” Conway told me. Proposition E is a payroll tax that many believe disincentivizes job creation in San Francisco.

According to Conway, the goal is to “save tech companies millions of dollars, encourage hiring, and help local small businesses.” He told me that in 2013, there will be an initiative in the city to educate and prepare local San Franciscans to take entry-level jobs at tech companies.

The video is a promotional effort for the San Francisco Citizens Initiative for Technology and Innovation, “Sf.citi,” a nonprofit that functions like a tech-centric chamber of commerce.

Conway commissioned the video from the same San Francisco-based production agency, Portal A Interactive, that produced the “Too legit to quit” video, where Conway publicly endorsed Ed Lee (a long-time friend to the tech community) for mayor, a post Lee currently holds.

Check out the video here:

PBS has been kicking butt lately with its viral video series (for reference, see this Mr. Rogers clip or the Bob Ross Remix). In a new YouTube vid, PBS gets super meta and tackles the whole concept of memetics and viral videos.

“Whether rooted in comedy, spectacle, schadenfreude, cuteness, politics, performance, or deep meaning, the idea of viral videos, and the huge audiences they generate, have forever changed the values and potential impact of video online,” the video description reads.

The long-ish video features words of wisdom from YouTube trend wizard Kevin Allocca, meme-meister Brad Kim of Know Your Meme, and Casey Neistat, one half of the Neistat Brothers filmmaking duo.

This vid is the latest in Off Book, PBS’s series of web originals about web/nerd life and culture. Other topics include a treatise on the evolution of 8-bit art and a short documentary on the culture (hah!) of Reddit.

Viral video is always a hot topic. It’s great theater – an ever-changing, ever-evolving window into Internet zeitgeist that enthralls millions of us every day. Few viral video fans, however, have any idea how videos become popular.

I’ve been distributing branded videos online for seven years. My company has run hundreds of campaigns for the world’s biggest brands, many of which have reached tens of millions of users. It may surprise you to learn, therefore, that I think viral video is a fantasy. It is a flawed and outdated concept that does not reflect the larger reality of how some videos gain traction and become online megahits.

First, let’s review the popular perception, and then we can step into the factory and see how the sausages are made, okay?

The dream goes something like this: A few kids make a video and they upload it to YouTube. There, someone finds it and falls in love. He shares it with his friends; he posts it on Facebook, and pretty soon millions of people are talking about it. The Twittersphere is all a-twitter. The video has risen above the fray. It’s gone viral!

It’s a great story, and like most great stories, it’s based on a kernel of truth. When a video is special people see it and they want to share with their friends. But the reality is, videos don’t reach audiences of 1 million people or more without the help of at least one major media outlet, no matter how good they are.

The media outlets I’m talking about are portals, content sites, TV shows, major blogs, or news publications. They’re necessary to create the scale that creates a “viral” hit. If you could look through the histories of the biggest viral videos, you would see them there. Every time.

Branded videos are no different. With over 60 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, finding an audience is no easy trick, even if you have a celebrity on the payroll. The viral monsters that we’ve known and loved are the products of large and well-funded digital marketing campaigns, not peer-to-peer sharing. Some brands use PR, some use “seeding firms” to try and drum up attention, and others turn to SEO marketing or display ads.

The most forward-thinking brands, however, have long since gotten over the whole viral video thing. They realize that the real value in online video comes from connecting with the right audience and generating earned media actions that are meaningful to their brands.

In some cases this means ingraining the brand in popular culture, but most brands need more than buzz to justify their budgets. Instead, they want to see Web site visits, store locator usage, coupon downloads, or other quantifiable consumer actions.

Achieving these results requires a well thought-out strategy with the right tools and partners. Here are a few things to keep in mind when creating your own game plan:

• Define the earned media actions you want: A vague conjecture about “viral sharing” isn’t enough – you need to conceptualize the program with tangible goals that will deliver value and ROI.
• Don’t get hung up on creating outrageous content: Big laughs and eye-popping special effects are great if they’re relevant to the brand, but how-to videos, recipe videos, special offers, and re-purposed TV commercials can be just as effective if they’re properly targeted.
• Choose distribution partners wisely: The online video landscape is growing more complex by the minute, and it’s important to understand the differences in the various offerings.
  • Seeding companies and PR firms utilize their relationships with bloggers and other online influencers to spread video to their networks of followers and readers.
  • Social video companies put users in control by giving them virtual goods or access to premium content in exchange for watching a video ad.
  • Click-to-play ad units are an alternative to the standard pre-roll format that are housed in banner ads or on content sites. Advertisers pay for only for users that have chosen to watch their video.
  • Blog networks push videos to hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of bloggers, some of whom will post advertorial text alongside the video itself.
• Ask the right questions: Whatever distribution route you decide to go, it’s important to make sure that your partner has clear and effective sharing tools, full transparency, and a pricing model that makes sense.

The bottom line is that there is more to “viral video” than meets the eye, and brands that take the time to learn the finer points can enjoy significant benefits that simply are not possible in other media.

Mitchell Reichgut is founder and CEO of Jun Group, the premier social video platform. Follow him on Twitter @jungroup.

Dead Island is a survival horror game that drops you on a zombie-filled island in the middle of a massive storm that has cut you off from the rest of civilization. It’s your job to survive and find other survivors and rally them together. The entire game is played from a first-person perspective, like modern shooters such as Call of Duty or Fallout, but features a wide variety of weapons outside of guns.

The game makes you to fight off massive hordes of hungry zombies and survive with whatever you can find nearby — knives, baseball bats and the like. Guns are scarce and the game forces you to fight off monsters that are eyeing you as lunch with even your own fists and feet. It’s a very vivid, in-your-face experience that tries to evoke the feeling that you’re fighting for your life as you try to push away a zombie gnawing on your face.

That vibe came through strongly in the game’s initial release trailer, Dead Island publisher Deep Silver chief operating officer Geoff Mulligan told VentureBeat. The original trailer went up in February on a Monday night. Mulligan approved it after watching it on his BlackBerry before leaving the country. That next morning it had around 750 views on YouTube. Then he turned his phone off and went off the grid. By the time he returned on Friday, the video had nearly 1 million views — well beyond the 100,000 the company had hoped for.

“It was a great, different kind of trailer — it hit people emotionally, not just with gameplay,” Mulligan said. “We decided to adjust everything on the fly, we got that kind of traction off the trailer and we started instantly modifying everything we were doing — the gameplay, a little bit of the story, the marketing campaign.”

The trailer (which you can view below) featured a visceral depiction of what might happen during a zombie attack at a tropical island resort, where no one — not even children — are safe from monsters hungry for human flesh. It didn’t pull any punches and immediately blew up on aggregator sites like Reddit, which both praised and slammed the trailer for its no-holds-barred approach to marketing the game.

“That filled me with an unbearable sense of inevitability and regret,” one Reddit user wrote in commentary for the trailer. “I always thought if a zombie apocalypse ever happened, it’d be epic and I’d grab a gun or an ax or hole up in a stocked shelter somewhere. I changed my mind, it’d blow,” another wrote. Both were top comments in the section voted up by the community, which means they were a pretty accurate depiction of the sentiment that appeared on the site surrounding the trailer.

The game picked up an enormous amount of buzz heading into the Electronic Entertainment Expo, one of the game industry’s largest trade shows, in July. Dozens of gamers lined up outside Square Enix’s booth to try out the game for a half hour. Those lines dwarfed the lines for Deus Ex: Human Revolution, one of Square Enix’s most high-profile U.S. releases in some time. About as many gamers were clamoring for a chance to play Dead Island as were trying to play Battlefield 3 or Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Dead Island was a blast to play at E3, where the whole island world was as gloomy and deadly as the feeling the trailer evoked. That’s partly because Deep Silver was able to get an enormous amount of consumer feedback for the game very quickly and tweak the game, which was not going to launch for another 7 months, Mulligan said.

GameStats, a site that ranks games based on the press, comments and general sentiment from gamers the game is getting, ranks Dead Island as the fourth most popular game right now ahead of its Tuesday release. The only games ahead of it are The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3, and those are all games that are expected to be massive blockbuster hits with hundreds of millions in revenue for major publishers Electronic Arts and the like.

And it’s all thanks to the viral explosion of that original trailer.

“I’ve been in the games business for almost 30 years, I would be less than honest if I said [Dead Island] would be exactly as successful today without that trailer as it seems to be with it,” he said. “You can’t buy that kind of hype.”

The company’s next game, Risen 2, comes out in the first half of 2012. Deep Silver plans to apply some of the new strategies it picked up while marketing Dead Island to try and build the same kind of buzz for its next title. It’s not clear if lighting will strike twice for the company, but Geoff said he was confident in the release schedule and in Deep Silver’s next titles.

“We are not going to be a one-hit wonder, because I know what our release schedule looks like,” Mulligan said. “We’ve gotten so much more refined so quickly in calendar 11 that we’re looking to have equal, if not greater success.”

(Warning: the trailer is very graphic and might not be suitable for some ages.)

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