If you’ve spent any time online at all, you must have run into several of these. Things like the “Star Wars Kid”, “Numa Numa Song”, “The Evolution of Dance”, and the “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” video. A viral video is “video clip content which gains widespread popularity through the process of Internet sharing, typically through email or IM messages, blogs and other media sharing websites.” They’re the bread-and-butter of sites like YouTube.
It wasn’t long after these things started getting popular that corporations, looking for ways to make up for declining television ratings, discovered that they could generate a lot of buzz by putting out a funny video that could be shared. The marketing machines of the big brewers have also turned their attention to this new way to reach their audience. After all, what is the key demographic for the big brewers? Men between the ages of 18 and 34. What is probably still the largest demographic of people who spend a lot of time online? Men between the ages of 18 and 34.
Bud.TV was part of this effort. It wasn’t purely about viral videos, but one of the most famous beer marketing viral videos was Bud Light’s “Swear Jar”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHBzAQoj4P0
That’s not the only video out there (just check out the video tag here on Hop Talk for a few) and there are more coming.
Associated Press: Beer makers increasingly turning to viral ads
Viral marketing has been around for more than a decade, but viral video ads have grown in popularity as it has become easier to watch and share video on the Web and video-sharing sites like YouTube have grown. Forrester Research estimates interactive advertising was worth $20 billion in the U.S. this year and projects that amount will triple by 2012.
“It’s definitely a trend, definitely happening,” said Benj Steinman, editor of Beer Marketer’s Insights. “But it’s still, relatively speaking, a small part of total (advertising) spending. The big part is still (on) sports on TV. That’s still where the action is for the young adult male target.”
Marketers are treading carefully. Branding has to be “gentle” otherwise it’s too much of a turn-off. Also, once you put a video out on the web it’s there forever; there’s no way to “pull” an ad, like you can with television advertising. And, of course, there’s no hard-and-fast measurements on how they affect beer sales. They are, at best, building “brand awareness”.
Alas, I am not in their desired demographic. I suspect you’re not either. That’s probably for the best. I’ve been finding the television ads from big brewers to be more and more peurile and have little tolerance for them. Videos on the web, at least, I don’t need to see if I don’t want to. Even so, they’re pure entertainment to me. I don’t see how a video from any of the big brewers, no matter how clever, will influence my attitude toward them. But since I’m not their target demographic, I guess that’s all right with them, too. Some of them are worth a chuckle, though.
