Today we had a little creative round-table about a new campaign for one of our clients. The client expressed interest in creating a series of television spots that would engage the audience and create an anticipation for the next tv commercials in the campaign. Earlier in the year, we produced a spot for them in which a young man goes around town, showing up in everyday locations, and convinces people to go back to school – but with a full-blown, high energy pitch, his trusted easel in tow. Check out the behind the scenes shoot here:
The client loved the spots and they performed well, but wanted to build on it to include a reason for the audience to anticipate the next spot as well as motivate them to go to the website for more info, and, hopefully create a viral effect down the road. Their idea was to kill off the ‘easel guy’ at the end of every spot, a la Kenny from South Park. I personally love the idea, but don’t think it would work because it would hurt ‘easel guy’s” credibility. Springboarding off of that idea, I think we have come up with a great alternative to achieve this. Now, I don’t believe you can “plan” a viral campaign necessarily. However, you can include a lot of the things that you think might make it viral, and I think our spots will have that. But videos go viral for a ton of different reasons, and the most important is the community – your audience – whether or not they think the content is funny enough, shocking enough, relevant enough, or just plain stupid enough to send it to their friends. We will go for a little of it all – humor, shock and stupidity. Stay tuned.
TedHead 