At this point we’ve lost count of how many times clients have referenced creating a “viral” video, with visions of Dollar Shave Club dancing in their heads.
If you recall, the budget razor start-up Dollar Shave Club launched an organic 90-second video on Youtube back in 2012. The video was responsible for 12,000 orders in two days and racked up 4.75 million views within a few months. Four years later, Dollar Shave Club was acquired by Unilever for 1 billion dollars.
The Dollar Shave Club video holds up to this day as a brilliant piece of video marketing, and it’s not surprising that brands come to us wanting to create video content that similarly breaks the mold. After all, our motto is “Be Unexpected.” That’s the message we preach and live by.
So why shouldn’t you aim to produce a viral video like Dollar Shave Club did?
Well, if by “viral” you mean uploading an organic video to Youtube and praying that it will collect millions of views and generate tens of thousands of conversions, I’m sorry to break it to you, but it ain’t gonna happen. Odds are, even if your video is awesome, you’ll end up with 25 views and a lot of questions about what went wrong.
In the olden days of 2012 when the Dollar Shave Club video blew up online, Facebook and Youtube optimized algorithms to widely promote popular videos in order to drive traffic to their sites. It was possible (but rare) that an organic video like the Dollar Shave Club piece could gain popularity overnight and generate massive engagement for a brand, with minimal investment to boot.
Fast forward to 2020, and with the impressive market saturation that social media giants have achieved, platforms like Facebook and Youtube are much less interested in driving new traffic to their platforms than they are milking every dollar out of advertisers. Today’s algorithms reflect this shift in priority, putting little weight in promoting viral content, and instead rewarding ad buyers who consistently upload videos and offer relevant content to targeted viewers.
So what does this mean for us as video advertisers?
You could interpret it as a bummer, but we see it differently. Sure, we may not be able to promise an overnight organic sensation like the Dollar Shave Club video, but even in 2012 the odds of that happening were lower than the odds of getting struck by lightning while swinging a golf club on the top of Trump Tower.
Today, instead of playing the “viral” lottery game with organic content, skilled digital advertisers have been armed with powerful tools that enable us to precisely target the right customers with creative video content that generates engagement, leads, and ultimately conversions. And on top of that, we can track key metrics all the way through the pipeline to measure results and refine strategy. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a much stronger marketing plan than the post and pray methods of days gone.
While the times and strategies have changed, the key factors that led the Dollar Shave Club campaign to engage a massive audience and disrupt a market are still some of the most important factors for digital advertising today. At Free Radical, we believe that of all the marketing options at your disposal (SEO, social media marketing, email, etc.) creative video advertising is king, and within the context of modern digital advertising, it’s a more powerful lever than ever.
So if by making a “viral” video, you mean producing an engaging and memorable video (or videos), deploying a strategic campaign with an ad spend to back it up, and generating measurable engagement and conversions, we’d say you are right on the money.
Schedule a free consultation with us to learn how we can create unexpected video content for your brand and get you measurable results with strategic digital advertising.