Chado-Design.com

Sweden’s TV licensing company Radiojanst recently released a new viral video campaign experimenting with emerging video technology that allow viewers to insert themselves or a friend into the commercial. The ad, titled ‘The Hero: A movie about you or someone you know”, builds up with a dramatic announcement about a new national hero who is making life better for the people of Sweden. This new Swedish hero ensures that viewers can trust what they see on television and radio and the voice of average Swede can be heard. Midway through the commercial the hero is revealed to be the viewer because they pay their broadcast fee. The ad shows crowds of people from around the world celebrating the viewer with their photo on billboards, signs, and TV. The idea for this video was for people to upload an image of their friend and email it to them so they can star in their very own commercial. At the end of the commercial it gives the option to make a new commercial with a different image that can be passed along to share with another new “star”. The video was very well received by international audiences with over 14 million site visits within 8 weeks.

This clever campaign was accomplished using viral video technologies like those used in Staple’s “Elf Yourself” holiday campaigns and MoveOn.org’s Glenn Beck satire that takes the viewers image and information from Facebook and inserts them into a viral video where they are appear to be publically smeared by the ridiculous, fear-mongering Glenn Beck. This new trend of in viral videos where the viewer can be a part of the commercial and shared has enormous potential for advertising. After all, one of the main goals in advertising is to get the potential customer to envision themselves using the product or service. Videos like this give the message a personalized look and feel allowing consumers to establish an emotional connection with the brand. It will be interesting to see how this technology will be used next and how it will continue to evolve the viral video.

Now that social media networks like Facebook have become a commonplace occurrence in our society and literally “everyone and their mother” has a profile, its no wonder that most major brands now utilize it to maintain an online presence and communicate their brand messages. Although there are hundreds of brands using Facebook, only a few have been able to utilize it to its fullest potential. IKEA is one of those brands.

Their campaign to promote the opening of its newest store in Mälmo has been wildly successful. It has been described as brilliant, smart yet simple, genius, and innovative. With a very small budget, Swedish agency Forsman & Bodenfors managed to start a Facebook campaign that was able to grow organically and transcend international boundaries on its own. By creating a basic profile for the store manager of the new store they uploaded images of IKEA showrooms from the new store to his photo albums over the course of two weeks. Those who became “friends” with Gustavsson were encouraged to tag themselves in the photos over products in the showroom images for a chance of winning that particular object. As word spread across Facebook and more people tagged the photo, the showroom images where subsequently shared on all their profiles, links, and newsfeeds with millions of people in Sweden, throughout Europe, and across the planet. Instead of simply placing a banner ad on various websites hoping for a connection, IKEA got people to personally promote IKEA on the biggest social networking platform around. Word of mouth advertising is considered the most effective and sharing on Facebook is the equivalent of word of mouth these days.