Viral is a dirty word

They came not to praise viral video, but to cure it.

Jeremy Sanchez and Robert Davis together lead the video content charge at Ogilvy USA; Jeremy from Oregon and Robert in New York City.

Today they’ve met in the middle to pack out one of the many rooms here at South by South West Interactive for their session “Viral is a dirty word.”

They’ve got a simple message, and going by the reception in the room, a welcome one: it’s not just about the viewer numbers, stupid. Only 4 percent of YouTube videos get over 100,000 viewers, making it for many marketers a shockingly inefficient way to connect with customers.

You can get more viewers than that by running two spots on Prime or indeed (to paraphrase Chris Morris) by sitting outside a railway station with a hat on the ground.

ABOVE: Robert Davis promotes his SXSW talk with ... a YouTube video. It's very straightforward, mind.

Yet the most toxic of all poisoned briefs, “make the client a viral video,” still hits creative department desks with sickening frequency.

A million views of your YouTube clip is still a fairly reliable way for a marketing manager to meet his or her KPIs, so it’s not surprising that a seven-figure audience count is a pretty important box to tick on the way to a six-figure salary.

For Sanchez and Davis, though, it’s all about taking a methodical approach, and putting strategy well ahead of content.

Rather than aiming their videos at the trunk of the search tree, they prefer to look at the branches, and identify specific terms their customers are likely to be searching.

So while they might not get a Charlie Bit My Finger online success, the eyeballs their videos attract are far more likely to be connected to a brain looking to buy the client’s product.

In this way their approach references Chris Anderson’s idea of the Long Tail – not as a description of a retail or product niche – but as a way to identify an online audience to produce video content that meets their needs. So instead of a video that attracts people looking for “shoes” (huge search volume but lots of competition), a retailer might create one aimed at people after “orange Adidas shoes,” (smaller audience – albeit one including me – but one far more likely to turn a view into a sale).

Sanchez and Davis’s message might not be one every marketer wants to hear from their agency (including a couple of notable New Zealand ones) but it’s refreshing and worth considering: not every video can or will turn into a double rainbow; better to spend some solid strategy time deciding exactly which colour you want to appeal to and do a great job of that.

Former Y&R creative director Vaughn Davis is founder of social media-focused agency The Goat Farm. Based in Auckland, he is currently attending the South by Southwest Interactive conference (aka SXSW) in Austin, Texas.