This year’s ads brought with them the usual mix of highs and lows, worshiping at the alter of celebrity with big names like Clint Eastwood, Elton John and Christina Aguilera among a whole host of others. Throw in some scantily clad ladies for a dash of sex appeal, a few babies to tick the cute boxes, just the right amount of geeky cult nostalgia to appeal to the masses and surprisingly quite a lot of dogs, and there you have it – Super Bowl commercials 2012.

Official 2012 Honda CR-V Game Day Commercial – This year’s ads were dominated by the car industry. We saw the teaser trailer for the Honda clip last week, now the extended version of “Matthew’s Day Off” comes in at the top of the NMA Brand Chart with over 12 million views and 235 thousand shares.  Matthew Broderick is cast as himself, skiving a day off work in a homage to the ’80’s classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It’s a fun little challenge for true Ferris fans out there – apparently there are over 15 references to the original film hidden in the video, can you spot them all?

Click here to view the embedded video.

“Transactions” Extended Version – 2012 Acura NSX Big Game Ad- Acura are the latest automobile giants to join their competitors in the Super Bowl ad slots, with their latest video featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno competing for the opportunity to be the first to own the new Acra NXS. It’s certainly not my favorite video from the day but there are a couple of nice references and cameos for Seinfeld fans and with over 15 million views and 45 thousand shares already it has certainly proved popular.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Dog Strikes Back: 2012 Volkswagen Game Day Commercial – Volkswagen shot into the advertising hall of fame last year with one of the most watched video campaigns of 2011, so we had high expectations from this years offering. Unfortunately the 2012 ad doesn’t quite live up to its awesome teaser trailer, but with over 5 million views and counting it comes in at number five in the chart.

Over on the UGC chart there are a couple of funny videos – Top of the list this week is Me and my grandma dancing to Rack City followed by Shit Single Girls Say and a rather amusing spoof video Apple Scotland – iPhone commercial for Siri.

Handshake awareness: This one comes in slightly lower down at number seven in the chart but it gave me a little giggle so i thought it was worth a mention. Imagine you’re meeting someone for the first time, anxious to make a good first impression, you go in for that strong confident hand shake then suddenly it all goes wrong… Do you suffer from awkward handshake syndrome? Don’t worry, apparently there’s help out there!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Brave Kitten Stands Up to Dog: Finally a bit of cat Vs dog action. We noticed the rather conspicuous absence of our favourite fluffy friends in the Super Bowl ads this year, which seemed to favour the dog as the top pet for 2012. So just to make sure you get your dose feline action here’s a clip of a super brave little kitten holding his own against a big ugly dog, go kitty!

Click here to view the embedded video.

To catch up on the full viral chart rundown visit the NMA Brand chart and UGC chart, powered by The Viral Ad Network.

Ads could either be inserted into a <div> (which used a blocking document.write call behind the scenes), or they could be inserted into an <iframe>. The majority of publishers only ever used the iframe method, but a few were provided with div insertion codes.

As our ad serving capabilities have advanced, we’ve created more and more formats which only work when inserted as an iframe (e.g. What we now call “Fun Units”).

At the same time, we have advanced our iframe insertion significantly:

• iframes are now loaded asynchronously on most web browsers – meaning your website loads much faster while our ads load in parallel.
• We’ve added lightbox ad formats, and extra library methods for ads which make our iframes super-powerful.

iframes brought many other improvements, such as fraud prevention and extra security for viewers from potential “malvertising” and “clickjacking” attacks.

We have now switched all ad unit embeds over to the iframe method.

You do not need to make any changes, and this should affect very few publishers.

However, if your current ad unit embed code contains a <script> tag pointing to this url:

http://syndication1.viraladnetwork.net/getad/?style=frame

Then you can now make your site a little bit faster for some users by changing that url to:

http://syndication1.viraladnetwork.net/getad/

All new embed codes will reference this new url, and the probability that it will already be cached in your user’s browser (or by a proxy) is higher.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Spectacular Man Made Sun Brightens up London 2 Hours Early: Here’s a cool little PR stunt that we’ve been seeding this week. Nobody likes dark winter mornings so Tropicana decided to bring a little extra sunshine to the streets of London by hoisting a giant artificial sun above Trafalgar Square, complete with deck chairs and glasses of orange juice for passers by to stop and enjoy a bit of a sunny boost on their way to work – smiles all around!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Megaupload mega song: Top of the UGC chart this week is the controversial file sharing promotional video from Kim DotCom. The clip, which features several big music industry names including Snoop Dogg and P Diddy, was already trending on Twitter following the shutdown of the Megaupload site earlier this month but was promptly removed from YouTube following a complaint from Universal Music, (despite the fact that the company does not control any rights to the video).

Click here to view the embedded video.

The song itself is a rather dull marketing clip but interestingly it’s been thrust into the media limelight as the latest example of the potential impact of the new anti-piracy movement. It has since been returned to YouTube after a successful lawsuit from Megaupload, but the owners are now facing indictment for copyright infringement and facilitating the wide scale illegal downloading and sharing of movies, music and other material online. The courtroom drama is set to continue for quite some time but the outcome is likely to be a sign of what we can expect of things to come, so watch this space!

Snoring dormouse with sound: On a lighter note, here’s our weekly dose of cuteness and my absolute favorite clip this week, one super sleepy little dormouse.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Lego man in space: Two Canadian teenagers make this brave little dude the first Lego man in space!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Using a helium filled weather balloon, two tiny cameras, a GPS tracking system and a homemade parachute, the pair managed to launch the plastic figure 16 miles into space (that’s three times the height of a commercial aircraft), capturing some beautiful shots of the curvature of the earth against the stunning blue of the stratosphere, before it parachuted back down to earth landing 75 miles away.

Radar: Crazy French prankster Remi Gaillard is back with the latest clip in the Dangerously Funny Videos series, this time he’s dressed up as a giant speed camera, flashing all kinds of traffic from tractors to trains. All appears to be going well until the police show up!

Click here to view the embedded video.

2011 – One Backflip A Day: This guys dad bet him $100 that he couldn’t do a backflip every day of 2011, so guess what he did…

Click here to view the embedded video.

One happy dog: Finally, rounding up the UGC chart with just a little bit more cuteness – most excited dog ever!!!

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can catch up on the full viral listings on the NMA viral Brand chart and UGC chart, powered by the Viral Ad Network.

According to The Guardian, the UK based Daily Mail has overtaken the New York Times to the most viewed online newspaper position.

The Media Blog explains that this has largely been achieved by the Mail Online focusing on scantily-clad celebrities, female figures in Bikinis, and other titillating content. This makes it’s readership quite different from the “white, middle-aged, middle class of middle England who worry about a news agenda of wheelie bins, cancer, hoodies, liberals and multiculturalism” that the Daily Mail’s print version caters to (as the Media Blog describes the audience).

But how much of a good example does this set for publishers?

Yes, the Mail has increased it’s readership very significantly – but the question is what has that done to their bottom line?

Very few brands would choose to advertise next to this kind of risqué content – meaning less competition, and lower prices. For those who are advertising, user engagement rate is likely to be lower – leading to lower click through rates.

A quick search for “Mail Online Revenue” brought the results I was expecting. Paid Content reported in July that the revenue per user had almost halved over two years – despite readership having increased by 82% in a single year.

After the overheads for serving content to this many viewers is included, it would be interesting to see how much of this reduced revenue they managed to turn to profit. Finding that out by itself would be difficult.

The Mail Online’s parent group (Associated Newspaper’s) reported a loss of $1,407,127.19 on digital operations in the year ending October 2011, which their CEO put down to struggling to sell ad space in the US, as well as capital spent on growth of operations.

The Mail’s $1.4M loss is compared to the NYTimes’ performance in Q3 alone, who posted digital revenue of $50.3M, and total net income of $15.7M across the company ($20M up from the year before) – despite declining revenue from print.

Perhaps the Mail Online isn’t setting such a great example to other publishers after all…

This is part of internet-wide action against the bills coordinated for Jan 18th, and we are not being paid to run these ads.

For more information, visit americancensorship.org

Perhaps the most confusing comment was from Twitter. Here’s the email their PR teams have apparently been sending out to news outlets:

For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.

Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.

We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.

Hang on a minute, are twitter implying that this change is going to stop twitter showing up in results?

As Google’s Matt Cutts blogs, the new change pulls in results from lots of sharing sites – including livejournal, friendfeed, and Google+.

You may ask why links from twitter aren’t on that list – is it some secret manipulation by Google? No. Twitter have told Google not to include results from Twitter.

How did they tell Google not to include their results? Well if you look at the HTML source for twitter’s website, you’ll see that all links from twitter have an attribute rel=”nofollow” on them. This isn’t an accident – it’s a special feature which Google introduced in 2005, designed to let websites tell Google not to show those links. There is no other reason for it – if you add that to your links (like twitter), you don’t want Google to count them.

There’s more though – you may remember that Google used to show more tweets in their search results, and why why that changed. The answer is that Twitter used to have a deal with Google to give them direct access to their data – which was not renewed when it expired in July 2011.

So in summary, six months ago Twitter stopped Google’s access to most of their data, and they tell Google not to include anything linked to from tweets. With that in mind, does Twitter’s statement about Search Plus Your World:

We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users

still make sense? Or does it suggest that Twitter may have an different motive for their emails?

organise the world’s information

Google’s Mission Statement is to “organise the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. And I personally believe that this latest change really is a tactical move to this end, rather than a pure land-grab for Google+ in the social space.

While Twitter do provide APIs to access their data, they charge significant sums to get real access at the volume that Google needs it.

By opening up large screen volume to social sites who provide free access to their data (such as livejournal and friendfeed, and their own Google+), they’re providing a huge incentive for sites to make their data accessible to be indexed and searched by search engines – which is Google’s core business after all.

The VAN team is back in the office again after a lovely Christmas break, recharged and full of new energy (um… well, lots and lots of caffeine at least).

Packed away the tinsel and party poppers, caught up on stacks of emails and exchanged holiday stories and resolutions around the kettle, so I guess that means it’s time to get back to work again!

We’ve got a whole stack of awesome campaigns and fun events lined up for 2012, but before we draw a line under last year lets have a quick peek at what we were talking about in 2011…

What was hot in the world of social media - I think it’s fair to say that Twitter and Facebook have become the unofficial global news sources for online communities, and as uncensored mediums that just about anyone can contribute to they’re probably a pretty accurate representation of the concerns of the world right? Well, if that really is the case this little round up by Frugal Dad is a bit embarrassing! According to data collected, the most influential key figures of the year were Justin Bieber, Charlie Sheen and Rebecca Black, whilst the most important event of the year was Beyonce’s pregnancy announcement!

What were we watching – As usual YouTube has released the annual YouTube Rewind Showcase featuring the top videos of the year and with Rebecca Black hosting you’ve probably got an inkling about what the most popular video of 2011 was! The internet is a platform capable of making pretty much anyone into an over night celebrity so what is the magic secret to viral stardom? Judging by this top 10 run down it looks like the classic winning combination of celebrity parodies, funny babies, cute animals and a quick dash of Star Wars.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, that was 2011, now bring on 2012!!

This is an extremely important part of VAN that looks after our bloggers and website owners; providing them with great ad campaigns that pay them well, and ultimately providing our advertisers with views for their campaigns on awesome sites.

So what’s the job like:

This is a great way to get started in the industry. You get to work on great campaigns for big clients, and you’ll pick up key skills in account management, planning, media buying and reporting. We hope you’ll stick around for a couple of years, but we’ll train you in ways that give you a great preparation to step up to your next position (whether it’s internal or external).

The role has three key responsibilities:

• • Help build our network of quality online publishers
  • Support the campaign management team with delivery of clients campaigns
  • Support the sales team with publisher input for pitching

In detail…

• • Researching and recruiting publishers and bloggers from desired categories to sign up to the network
  • Assessing and processing incoming publisher signups.
  • Categorising publisher inventory to aid campaign planning and pitching
  • Expanding VAN’s profile across key social media platforms – tweet, blog, get involved…
  • Help to grow VAN’s publisher community with relevant marketing & events.
  • Ensure VAN publisher inventory meets individual campaign targets.

What you’re like:

This is a job for people who:

• • Are comfortable with numbers, especially straightforward arithmetic.
  • Enjoy talking to people by phone and email to develop relationships.
  • Work hard (cliche, but true here). It’s a job where you need to get your tasks done to time. It can also be necessary to check campaign progress out of office hours (using online systems).
  • Have solid writing skills: we don’t have time to check your spelling etc, and we’re working with publishers who may judge us negatively if you can’t write clearly and accurately.

The type of work is fairly consistent and suits someone who is happy to do similar tasks on a daily basis. That said, the job is exciting: new opportunities come up, new relationships will be formed, we get sales wins and awesome content to seed, and campaigns need to get their views.

You will definitely need:

• • A genuine desire to get stuck into work and take responsibility.
  • A passion for online publishing. You need to be an active consumer of digital, and experience writing or running a blog would be great.
  • Previous work experience, this can be anything dealing with people or a task based role. It doesn’t have to be relevant to marketing or online, but we don’t have time to teach you the most basic professional and get-things-done skills.

Salary and progression

• • Within the role, you can progress from ‘novice’ to ‘ninja’. This would take a couple of years. A complete novice starts on £14.4k, and a ninja would get around £25k.
  • There’s healthy profit share on top for all staff (linked to company performance), and a success club (team rewards for making monthly sales target).
  • There’s a wide range of progression opportunities when it’s time to move on from this role. There may be opportunities to move up within VAN taking management responsibility for aspects of sales or operations, or moving elsewhere within the Team Rubber group. It’s also a great stepping stone into agencies or client-side marketing, giving a solid grounding in account management, media planning and buying, and campaign operations.

Interested? To apply mail ally@viraladnetwork.net with a covering letter outlining why you think you are suitable for the position and where your strengths lie along with a 2 page CV.

“At first glance, the new YouTube channel design, looks set to turn use of the channel on its head. Gone is the need to use any search (why would you, that is what Google is for) instead, as soon as you sign in, there is a video timeline, most recent at the top.

With a lot more than just a quick nod to the style of Twitter’s website and Facebook’s wall, the new design puts the most recent video at the top of a list of videos from all the channels you subscribe to.

This is a huge step away from the channel-based approach that has been the focus up to now. It is also a leap on from the Cosmic Panda revamp; the poor beast looks simply to have been buried behind the new user’s home page.

The first thing that hit me was the sheer number of things on the page. Check out the image above. That said, having grown to love the simplicity of Twitter’s timeline, you soon adjust to the new layout. There is a lot to take in, with individual videos form your subscriptions taking center stage, recommendations on the right sidebar and main navigation down the left, yet it feels natural, an significant evolution not a revolution.

Fundamentally users are going to be forced – with a small ‘f’ – to change the way they use the channel. Subscriptions are no longer an after thought, they are the crux of the whole experience. I can see subscriptions going through the roof.

The other major change is that registering with Google will be the entry point into getting the most out of YouTube. The majority of us have already taken this plunge be it from Gmail, iGoogle, docs or maybe even Google+. Till now my YouTube use, like many people’s I suspect, has been adhoc, I simply watch the videos embedded in sites off the platform. There has been no need to sign in. Now there is a solid reason to sign up and get subscribing. This will soon become the norm, turning the current status quo on its head.

Brand channels are going to have to think seriously about the impact in two ways:

1. Channel takeovers and on-site advertising could be much less effective
2. Visiting a company or brand channel will now be an after thought and not the main reason to go to YouTube, no more prioritization of videos they want you to see

There are also ways to discover more quickly. Trending, popular and music buttons on the left hand navigation pull up YouTube compiled lists. The music list is a clever idea, as a significant number of people already use YouTube as a computer based jukebox. These look to be global lists at the moment and localizing would make this even more compelling.

So is this another indicator of Google’s broader strategy to put the content at the center of the user experience? Is it now putting individual preferences and popular recommendation at the heart of YouTube? Is this a result of the surge in search on Facebook? Looks to me like all of these things.”