Viral Ad Network

ShelterBox is an international disaster relief charity that delivers emergency shelter, warmth and dignity to people affected by disaster worldwide. They created this powerful video, drawing comparisons between the horrible reality of the situation, and a big screen disaster movie.

In collaboration with JWT and other agencies, we’re doing our bit to spread the message and help the situation in Japan. The video is now live on the Viral Ad Network, and we’d really appreciate it if you could share the video in any way you can – tweet, post to Facebook, blog – every little helps.

YouTube has become so well integrated into our online activity that it’s easy to forget what a fundamental role it plays. To give some perspective, daily views on YouTube exceed 2 billion, with the average individual spending 15 minutes a day on the site.

When planning a viral video campaign and associated seeding activity, we think YouTube provides the perfect home for content. Don’t just take our word for it – 94 of Advertising Age’s top 100 agencies have run YouTube based campaigns.

Here’s what we feel makes YouTube the perfect platform:

- People are familiar and comfortable with it. Whether on YouTube.com itself, or viewing an embedded video elsewhere, people know what to expect when they click “play”. Removing any element of doubt should increase willingness to engage with the content.

- It’s easy to share. YouTube make it very simple for people to share links or embed the content on their own sites. This promotes natural sharing and spreading of content which is key to viral success.

- It allows discussion. The ability to easily comment means you’re able to gauge audience sentiment (good or bad).

- There’s a strong link with social media. Being able to quickly tweet or share to Facebook maximises the reach of the content. It’s worth noting that on average, 46.2 years of YouTube video is watched on Facebook per day, and a single tweet sharing the video results in an average of 7 new YouTube.com sessions.

- Content is viewable on a variety of devices, including mobile (crucially on iPhones and iPads).

- You can track campaign performance easily. Not only with the obvious increases in view count, but with the insight YouTube provides.

- Channels allow you to build a branded experience, building loyal subscribers over time.

- Even when bought media (seeding) promotion ends, the content remains on YouTube for people to search and view with no hosting costs, increasing long term value of the activity.

By using a version of YouTube’s syndicated player, the Viral Ad Network is able to harness the advantages of the platform to add real value to advertiser campaigns. Check out our example ad units here to get a better idea of how it works.

Facts and figures from Website Monitoring.