Cool Marketing Thoughts

A very interesting article on Business Week about viral videos and viral marketing, which is an obligatory read if you’re as deep into this as I am. Must read, must read.

Today, Robinson’s London company, The Viral Factory, charges $250,000 to $500,000 to create ads he guarantees will reach an audience equal to or greater than the one that saw his original $10,000 clip. “You can’t do what we did back then,” Robinson says. “Today, we could never go to a client and say, when they ask how we are going to distribute it, ‘Well, I have five mates.”

Not only do advertisers need to spend more to make the ads, but increasingly, they’re having to pay for placement on sites. YouTube, the largest video site, shows about 100 million videos daily. It sells several visible spots, though it won’t disclose advertising fees. “Over the coming months you will see various forms of advertising on the site that (are) mutually beneficial to both the users and the advertisers,” says Julie Supan, YouTube’s senior marketing director.

[...] Then there’s Kontraband.com, a popular British entertainment and content-sharing site. It charges between 10,000 pounds and 50,000 pounds a week for placement on its site and others. Recently, Kontraband hosted an ad for Unilever-owned Axe deodorant that cost $200,000, says Kontraband Chief Executive Richard Spalding. Within a few weeks, it was seen by more than 780,000 online users worldwide, according to Spalding and The Viral Factory, which created the ad. The ad, featuring men in a small town in Alaska who use Axe to attract women, has been viewed more than 10 million times.

Microsoft plans to release its YouTube competitor by yearend. Spokespeople are saying little about the site, internally named “Warhol”, except that it will feature original programming and host user-created videos.

[...] As yet, many of the hundred or so video sharing sites still don’t charge for virals. Many fear that too many ads in paid spots will drive away audiences and stifle user-created content. After all, users go to these sites to see the videos most people find interesting—not ones some company paid to place. Even Yahoo and Google still have few paid spots. Most of their video virals are posted for free along with user-created ads.

Read the entire article, and be glad you did.
Also tune in for a little slideshow of viral clips.