El Espectáculo de Sombras Chinescas Más Impresionante del Mundo

The world’s largest shadow puppet show – filmed at a live football match in Valencia.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The video is part of a Europe-wide integrated campaign that we’re seeding for the agency JWT to advertise Trident Gum. How does a video of giant shadow puppet chickens playing football advertise chewing gum? I hear you ask… Well the clip is just one of a whole bizarre series from The Pointless Collective, designed to spread the word that ‘chewing Trident Senses Gum is pointless yet fun’.

The campaign features a collection of films, events, quirky artwork and funny stories that follow the adventures of three masked super heroes as they come up with elaborate ways to bring pointless fun to the world. Check out their website and Facebook page if you want to read more about their various crazy escapades.

Diversity | Street Dance For Change

Now, any Britain’s Got Talent fans out there will remember the 2009 wining dance group, Diversity. Well they’ve teamed up with insurance firm Aviva to make the Street Dance For Change video as part of the Street to School programme, committed to raising awareness of the 100,000 young people who run away every year in the UK.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Through the initiative, Aviva are supporting street children projects in the UK and around the world, with the aim of helping half a million street children get back in to education or training by 2015. In the UK, their charity partner Railway Children is dedicated to supporting vulnerable children living alone on the streets, where they suffer abuse and exploitation.

If you fancy yourself as a bit of a ‘Mover-groover’ why not have a go and upload your own 30 second dance video, not only will Aviva donate £2 to the charity every time the video is watched but you might also be in for a chance to win tickets to Diversity’s 2012 tour and meet Diversity themselves!!

Check out the official Facebook page for more information on how you can get involved and watch some of the best uploaded dance clips.

YouTube is by far the most well established video-hosting platform on the market and with Google now including YouTube videos on their main search results pages, it’s essential to get the SEO right if you want your video to be noticed.

Over 13 million hours of video were uploaded to the site last year alone and competition for views is higher than ever, so we’ve put together a few handy tips on how to optimise your video to give it the best chance of being found…

1 – Titles & Descriptions:

Yes it sounds obvious but worth a mention, try and use as many relevant keywords as possible in your title as it’s the first thing people will read when skimming through search results.

It’s important to spend time writing the video description because it will show up both in YouTube and Google search listings. You should try and repeat relevant keywords again here, (being careful to avoid keyword stuffing). Remember that only the first few words will be shown in search results but keywords from the additional text will be detected and help make your video more easily searchable.

2 – Keywords:

Think carefully about the keywords that are most appropriate and do some research to find out what search terms are popular. YouTube have a handy Keyword Tool that allows you to view search volumes for individual words, analyse the demographics of people searching for them and generate suggestions. Avoid the temptation to include words simply because they are popular if they don’t have a direct relation to your video, it may result in an initial traffic boost but you will end up with high bounce rates which will tell YouTube to make your content less visible.

3 – Video Thumbnail:

Choosing a good thumbnail image for your video can dramatically increase the chances of it standing out. We’ve all heard of the expression ‘judging a book by its cover’ and rightly or wrongly that’s exactly what people do on YouTube. When presented with a list of thumbnail video images, viewers tend to skim down the first page and pick those with the most striking pictures.

After uploading your video you will have 3 thumbnails to choose from. These images are not randomly selected but calculated on fixed positions within your clip so it’s possible to manipulate the video to control your options.

You can calculate the exact position of your thumbnails by following the equation below…

X = Video length (in seconds)

Y = X divided by 4

Y is the 1st thumbnail.

2 x Y is the 2nd thumbnail

3 x Y is the 3rd thumbnail.

If you find that a bit too much to think about in advance you can always tweak your video directly in YouTube and see how your edits effect the thumbnail images selected.

4 – Links:

Google will use the number of links to your video to determine its position in the search rankings, so you should create links everywhere you can. Use your website, write comments with links on relevant blogs, you can even build up links within YouTube itself by creating video responses to other relevant clips, (again be careful not to over do this or it might be identified as spam). Don’t forget to leverage social media sites and post regular updated links on Twitter, Facebook and other services and make sure you enable embedding so other people can post your video on their sites.

A really good way to boost the number of links to your video is to use a seeding service like the Viral Ad Network which will distribute your video and links across hundreds of blogs encouraging the viral sharing effect to really get your clip noticed!

5 – Be aware of user signals:

YouTube want to keep viewers engaged with its content, so in order to make the most relevant videos more easily searchable it uses an algorithm that tracks user interaction.

It’s worth keeping in mind some of the following signals that it takes into account…

Created by advertising agency JWT London and seeded by our sister agency Rubber Republic for the charity MCAC, this week glamour model Rhian Sugden shot into the viral chart with her saucy video Rhian Touches Herself. Aiming to awareness of Testicular Cancer, with a rather shocking twist at the end, definitely worth a watch!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Next up we have the latest video from T-mobile, keeping their trademark guerilla advertising style with some hidden camera magic. Fake traffic wardens hand out parking fines to unsuspecting members of the public resulting in an amusing backlash of anger and tears, only for them to discover that the fines are actually part of a massive cash give away promotion. Ah, we like happy endings.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Over to the UGC chart and top of the bill is the hilarious Ojai Valley Taxidermy TV Commercial, and yes, incredibly this is a genuine ad to promote the local taxidermy company. Created by comedy duo Rhett & Link, who make deliberately ridiculous low budget TV ads in the hope that their absurdity will make them YouTube viral hits, this clip has pushed the local firm into the limelight.

From stuffed bears, antelopes, cheetahs and birds, it seems no challenge is to great for Chuck Testa. Maybe it’s time for the giant cardboard moose head on our office wall to have a new companion!

Click here to view the embedded video.

At number three in the UGC chart is the super catchy I Like Trains. I sort of don’t want to like this video but I just can’t help myself, its toe-tappy tune has just become the official soundtrack of my morning. Now all we need is for someone to make one about cats!

Click here to view the embedded video.

And finally, because teenage smutty humour never fails to get a laugh and we all like a good TV mash up, here is an amusing new slant on Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For the full industry viral chart rundown visit the NMA Viral Brand Chart or check out the best of the home made classics on the Viral UGC Chart.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’d like to know more about how we optimise ads, feel free to get in touch.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions on how we implemented the open social gadgets to our dash, or of course if you’d like help seeding your viral campaign.

This is a very interesting topic to me. With my leniency towards very specific definitions, I’m going to start right from the start, and explain that I’m certainly not a believer in Wittgenstein’s views on natural language.

To me, it’s not unreasonable to define a strict subset of natural language with a single, well defined, 1-1 semantic value function for discussing technical matters (and I believe the definition of “viral” should fit into such a subset), in the same way that we define mathematical terms in first order logic (I’m not going to get into provability here).

i.e. I think that it’s possible, and reasonable, to define the meaning of individual words which are indisputable and fixed when talking in technical language.

For this reason, it really drives me up the wall when two people talk about something, use the same word, but are actually discussing different things.

An example is how we have recently changed the naming for our “Syndicated Ad Units” (Previously “Content Units”).

When we define terms for such a large system, we are effectively defining our own language (or at least the non-common alphabet – technically the set from which words are taken rather than set from which letters are taken). By changing the naming for the system, we have effectively created a second language.

These languages are technically as distinguishable as programming languages are – and switching between requires the same work as switching between programming languages.

Obviously we don’t want too much redundancy in our alphabet, or we end up

• Having to remember a much larger set of nouns
• diverging strongly from a 1-1 semantic value function, which is indistinguishable from the effect of losing orthogonality of the semantic values of individual nouns

To explain the second point, if we mark the semantic value function of a language “I” (for “interpretation”), and we have an alphabet that consists only of the words “abc”, “def” and “ghi”, then if we have orthogonality in semantic values of the nouns, we would have that changing the meaning of “abc” – marked I(“abc”) (though adding functionality to the thing we call “abc”) changes I(“abc def”) in the same way as I(“abc ghi”) changes. It also implies that I(“zyx…wv”) does not change  unless “abc” is part of “zyx…wv”.

We did a very interesting thing while we changed the language used for syndication – we changed which objects have their own names. This changes the set of concepts that can be described with a single word – {I(a) for a in the alphabet}, rather than simply changing the strings used for the objects in the alphabet.

This fundamentally changes the language, and changes the effort required when semantic value functions change (as they always will on a long term software project).

For example, let’s take some of the objects that have changed names (you can see what the semantic values of these names are here):

* “(gadget)” is added internally for this type of Fun Unit.

By enforcing these changes, several changes to the alphabet are implied – firstly the fact that we do not use “gadget” externally creates two alphabets, and hence two new languages – but the aim is to keep one language a subset of the other one.

Previous alphabet:

“Med. Rect.”, “Gadget”, “Content Unit”, “Text Link”, “Text/Image Link”, “Fun Link of the Day”

New alphabet (internal):

“Med. Rect.”, “Fun unit”, “Gadget”, “Text Link”, “Fun Links”, “Text and Image Link”, “Fun Link of the Day”

New alphabet (external):

“Med. Rect.”, “Fun unit”, “Text Link”, “Fun Links”, “Text and Image Link”, “Fun Link of the Day”

Now let’s look at how orthogonal the meanings of these are…

if we suddenly decided to break years of internet tradition and say that a “Med. Rect”  was actually 1024 pixels wide and one pixel high – that would effect all names with “med. rect.” in them equally. In fact, the meaning has not changed at all between the two languages – it defines the size that the syndicated placement will take up on your website.

similarly, the meaning of “Text Link” has not changed (and although we changed the string “Text/Image Link to “Text and Image Link”, the actual interpretation of these strings has not changed).

If you are looking closely though, you will have noticed that “Fun Link of the day Text Link Content Unit” has changed to “Fun Link of the day Fun Links” – this is an important change, since they have the same interpretation, the meaning of “Text Link” has not changed, and yet “Text Link” is not in the new name. This means that this semantic value must be associated with the phrase “Fun Link of the Day” – and so it is. But “Fun Link of the day” is also associated with a size (this is more obvious in the origional naming conventions) This is a many-1 mapping between the old language and the new one, and as such it changes the implied syntax quite dramatically.

Now for the most interesting strings – “Content Unit” has been changed to either “Fun Unit”, or “Fun Links”. This is very clearly a 1-many mapping during the changeover, which again changes the syntax of the language dramatically.

For example, let’s imagine (and this is purely imaginary), we decided to add a feature that (describing the semantic change in the old language) allowed you to “place your content unit in an RSS feed”.

In the old language, we have just updated the semantic value of “content unit”, however in the new language we have updated the semantic value of “Fun Unit” and “Fun Links”. Thus they are non-orthogonal (in fact, in terms of this change they would be parallel!).

For a user (of the language) who understands the new semantic value of “Fun Unit”, they cannot know that the semantic value of “Fun Links” has changed unless they have some prior knowledge about the language.

But how do we describe this intra-linguistical knowledge in the language itself? We cannot say “All content units have …”, because “content unit” is not in the new language. Rather, we would have to state that “Fun Units and Fun Links have …” – but this requires updated semantic values to two strings from the alphabet. This might not seem like much, but by talking in a specific language we actually train parts of our brains to translate from this language into semantics (this was explained by Derek Smith at the Bristol Knowledge Unconference much better than I could explain it). This is an actual change to our brain that we are requiring – and we are requiring two changes in the new language.

To avoid this, we have added another string to the alphabet of our new language – “Ad Unit”. An “Ad Unit” can be a “Fun Unit” or “Fun Links” – but not both – so the interpretation of “Ad Unit” is the common interpretation between a”Fun Unit” and “Fun Links”.

But then if the semantics have remained the same between the two languages, the interpretation of “Ad Unit” must be the same interpretation as “Content Unit” was before…

That would mean that “Fun Unit” and “Fun Links” (both new words) are completely irrelevant words – since they don’t add any semantic information to the language!

Well, to explain this one we have to go back to the reason that we actually replaced the language in the first place. The first language  was defined by myself and Andy as we were thinking over the technical requirements, for use in implementing the systems. The second language came about after our sales and network teams mentioned that they thought users would get confused over the meanings of phrases.

We took this as a sign that we actually had two languages in use already – since there was obviously some concept that was essential to how this second group of people viewed the system that was not a concept to the technical team.

After some very long discussions, this concept had still not appeared to me, but the non-technical users described something that resembled the new language as describing their concepts better. This is a very interesting point to have come to in development terms – since it appeared to be a sign of what the users want to use the system to which is far better than anything that could be got out of a simple user-interview.

After hammering this out for several days, we finalised the new language. The above examples are only a small sub-section, but they are the section that cause the largest change in the allowed syntax of the language.

What was the difference?

Firstly let me quote the definition that the non-technical users decided on for “Fun Units” and “Fun Links” (I would have been far more strict over the definition, but if you’ve read this far then there’s a good chance that you would have as well; we may re-visit this definition):

• “A Fun Link is an Ad Unit into which the Viral Ad Network can place a link to site hosting an asset”
• “A Fun Unit is an Ad Unit into which the Viral Ad Network can insert actual content”

And that seems to be the difference – to me as a developer, there is a difference between the A,IMG,OBJECT,SCRIPT tags etc, – but that difference is contained in the selection between “Text Link”, “Text/Image Link”, “Video Player” (not mentioned previously) and “Gadget” (“Text” can only contain A tags, “Text/Image” can contain A and IMG tags, “Video Player” can only contain an actual video file, and “Gadget” can contain whatever you want).

For a non-technical user, really focusing on “this could be content” is more important – even though you could say that that information is already contained in the language, it’s so important that they want to say it twice.

Hence we’ve got the “old” and the “new” languages describing these things – the old language is cognitively simpler to learn, contains less vocabulary to learn, requires less mental work when new features are implemented, contains a single induced syntactic structure (at least over the vocabulary mentioned here) due to the orthogonality of semantic values, and does not require intra-linguistical “meta-knowledge” to talk about subsets of the language. It also has very low redundancy due to the

The new language has enforced redundancy, non-static syntactical structure, a larger vocabulary, non-orthogonal nouns, and thus has no strict subsets (when talking about Ad Units) that are languages capable of describing semantic updates in themselves. On the other hand, it focuses the mind on what the non-technical users found most important by repeating itself.

As you may have guessed, developers will continue to use the “old” language, and not just because switching over to the new language would require thousands of lines of code to be re-worked.

Tim Wintle

(oh, BTW, My definition of “viral” was brought here)