How NOT to do a viral on YouTube

With every new big budget movie going online for its marketing efforts, things are getting very predictable and mostly un-interesting, especially on channels like YouTube. A huge favorite of producers are YouTube takeovers, which we’ve seen for movies like the Invincibles and brands like Tipp

. Where in the user is taken to a dedicated YouTube page where a lot of engagement happens with the brand (mostly without the user’s knowledge). YouTube takeovers aren’t easy creating, they often have to go along with the brand communication strategy itself with a lot of homework on production and execution of the videos itself. As far as I understand the production cost of a YouTube Take over can cost anything from 40000 to 100000 USD.

The problem with YouTube takeovers is that they have very thin brackets to explore. If the core idea behind the concept is flawed then the whole exercise goes waste.

Take for example the new viral video from Twentieth Century Fox for the their new flick “Rise of the Apes”. The viral video (not a take over) “Ape with an AK47” has gone viral (they’ve seeded it well on the right networks) over the last 48 hours. But in my opinion, there’s a lot of negativity this video is going to amass in the next few days. The execution is poor though the concept is interesting.

1 – The video is very vivid and HD that it doesn’t look amateur. Easily identifiable as “staged”.

2 – The guys in the video are all over acting. Don’t think I need to explain this.

3 – The camera movements are not that impressive.

4 – Poor sound.

One can argue that these are finer details nobody will look into. True, but these are finer details that will make someone say “There’s something fishy about this video.”

Like I said, when it comes to YouTube, you have to be extremely clever in devising a concept and always the finer details (though not so evident) are the one’s that make the final call.

The thing is all of us watch lots of viral videos daily so even though we aren’t experts at this thing, we know what’s fake and real. Such is our learning curve – and brands and people who create new virals better not challenge it.