On Sunday morning, I received a link to a Wall Street Journal blog from my dad. The blog focused on what’s viral online right now and included two videos — one for Evian using rollerskating babies and one about United breaking guitars. That evening, my mom forwarded me the YouTube link to the Evian commercial. Come Monday morning, half a dozen of my Facebook friends had posted one of these videos. Another linked to a BlueCross BlueShield gem with adorable — and funny — children. (See all links below.)
In the case of the United music video, it’s not a commercial for the airline — obviously. It’s a cautionary tale of what can happen when you irritate the wrong people. So, it’s no wonder this one caught on. But the other two? They’re commercials! I’m a fairly recent convert to DVR. Before that, I at least muted the commercials, and here I was voluntarily watching commercials. Something is very wrong with this picture.
As we all know, videos go “viral” for a number of reasons — often because they’re funny. But how genius is it that companies are actually getting US to use our personal Facebook pages to share their messages! The WSJ is linking to them. Heck, even my non-social-media-equipped parents were among the first to share these latest videos with me.
In this (and any) economy, it makes sense to get extra mileage out of your ad dollars. And maybe it makes sense to cut back on TV advertising costs if you can earn traffic online for free. If nothing else, it means better commercials for the rest of us, right?
If you happened to have missed the few I mentioned, check them out on YouTube: