We here at Visible Measures watch many viral videos each day -- some might argue that this is a job perk, but I digress. Of course, these viral videos are typically contained in a video player on a Web page, either at a video sharing site or embedded into a blog post.
But what if that video could spill out of the player and onto the page around it? Well, it looks like the marketing minds behind the Nintendo Wii's upcoming Wario Land title asked the very same question... and went ahead and launched their Wario Land: Shake It! viral video ad that quite literally breaks new ground. Below is a video capture of the entire experience, but you really need to go to the page for the full effect.
As you can see, the “Wario Land: Shake It” trailer plays just as any Internet video would, but, as Wario busts up everything in sight, things start flying out of the video and onto the rest of the page. As the cartoonish carnage continues, the YouTube page begins to fall apart. Comments are thrown around, menu bars crash into related videos, and viral video chaos ensues.
So how has this campaign performed? To date, the view count has shot up over 3 million views. We then dug into our Viral Reach Database and uncovered more than 150 other video placements related to the campaign that have collectively accumulated almost 1.5 million additional views.
However, the delta between one admittedly special viral video and 150 of its "regular" companions goes beyond total views. The viral Shake It experience appears to have generated increased awareness of, and hence interest in, the Wario Land: Shake It! game itself.
Before the “Shake It” experience began tearing apart its YouTube page, Wario-related viral videos averaged about 5,000 views per day. However, after the viral ad began to take off, viewership of the normal Wario clips surged almost 500% to over 25,000 views per day. Mission accomplished!
So far, this surge in interest has been largely confined to related clips within the YouTube environment, even though Wario-related content has also proven popular on GameTrailers.com, a major site for video game enthusiasts. With that said, it's still early in the Wario Land: Shake It! viral video campaign and we'll be watching to see if the halo effect extends to the broader network of video sharing sites.
What do you think will happen? Do you believe that this is an interesting flash-in-the-pan, or will we all look back on it as a ground-breaking campaign that forever changed the face of viral marketing?
And, as always, we'd love to hear about any particularly interesting viral video campaigns -- that remain inside the video player, explode across the page, or do something else entirely. We take requests!
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The data used in this post was collected from our Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing video repository of analytic data on 100+ million Internet videos from 150+ video-sharing destinations.