The wildly popular video game franchise, Guitar Hero, certainly seems to have struck a chord -- pun fully intended -- with its latest advertising campaign. In the ads, it slots different Guitar Hero guitar-toting celebrities into the famous “Old Time Rock and Roll” scene from the 80’s teen classic, “Risky Business.”
To play the role of Tom Cruise, game maker Activision wisely strummed its way into the heart of pop culture by tapping American Idol stars David Cook and David Archuleta, sports stars Alex Rodriguez, Kobe Bryant, Michael Phelps and Tony Hawk, and last but not at all least, supermodel Heidi Klum. Given such a line up, we at Visible Measures couldn't resist dipping into our Viral Reach Database to do some classic viral video comparisons. While its still early in the campaign's lifecylce, the top-line results have so far been impressive: a total video view count of nearly 8 million across more than 300 distinct video placements.
To begin, we divided the videos by star category, comparing Idols vs. Athletes vs. Supermodel, and looked at relative performance in our own viral video battle of the bands. To be clear, these groupings closely matched the ads themselves, one per David, one for the Athletes and two for the Supermodel (more about that later). This is where things got interesting.
Despite the not-so-long ago completion of American Idol, which has propelled the popularity of the Davids, the historic Olympic performance by Michael Phelps, and the ever-present popularity of the other sports stars, Heidi Klum's jam routine routed the other contestants by a margin of roughly 400,000 views. In total, the supermodel’s videos drove more than 3.1 million video views and 95 video placements.
As for how she pulled this off, we mentioned that Heidi had two videos. One is the made-for-TV version. The other is the Director's cut, in which Heidi stays true to her Victoria’s Secret roots.
The two videos are below. See if you can note the difference.
Not at all surprisingly, the more risque Director's cut is trouncing the demure original video by almost 700%. And while this doesn't tell us much that we didn't already know about online video viewing habits, we do find it interesting to see how the Guitar Hero World Tour franchise is experimenting with a diverse yet brand-consistent portfolio of creative viral videos.
Author’s note: Aaron Kutylo, in the account management group at Visible Measures, admits that he enjoyed researching this post and in the process, might have contributed slightly to the views that gave Ms. Klum her lead. He also reluctantly admits that, as a geeky 13 year old, he wanted to be Joel Goodsen from Risky Business.
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The data used in this post was collected from Visible Measure's Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing video repository of analytic data on 100+ million Internet videos from 150+ video-sharing destinations.