This week KittenCamp dished out a double dose of fuzzy fun, hosting an evening in both London and Bristol. As part of its recent tour the KittenCamp bunch have been spreading the kitten love across the map and on Tuesday they landed in Goldbrick House, the unofficial drinking spot for Bristol’s creative folk.
For anyone who doesn’t know, KittenCamp is a meet-up for web-loving, media types to chat about some of the latest internet memes, have a chuckle over a few recent YouTube virals and generally share the kitten goodness. As it turned out the promise of an evening of free drinks hosted by a guy dressed as a giant cat seemed to capture people’s curiosity and the event was packed out!
Among the host of cat clips, which included the ominous inception cat, a cat bullying feisty tortoise and the talented DJ Kitty, was the Herding Cats experiment for Ikea.
You’ve probably all come across the furniture store’s “Happy Inside” ad already and I have to admit that when it first crossed my TV screen it elicited the predictable amount of squeaky aaaaah’s that could be expected from any cat lover. The fact of the matter is that people love to watch ads featuring cute animals, just look at the crazy number of hits on YouTube kitty clips, and if one cat is good how much better would 100 cats be?
Well, this seems to be the reasoning of the advertising firm behind the commercial, Mother London, who also released the ‘Making of’ video Herding Cats which has generated over 2 million views and counting.
The clever thing about this clip is that it functions almost as a covert advert. Building on the success of other large campaigns like Sony Bravia’s Playdough Bunnies or the recent Toyota Prius ad, that focus less on producing informative adverts about their products and instead work on the rational that if they do something ‘awesome’ and film it, the public will do the marketing for them and they will have an instant internet viral success.
And of course any successful viral can expect to become fodder for a series of parody remakes and this hilarious Ikea remix does not disappoint!
One of my other favorite videos of the evening was the Google Wave Cinema clip that popped up on YouTube a little while back. Created by two guys in America and made in just a few hours it’s a really interesting demonstration of the power of Google Wave to streamline human interaction with organized snippets of online media and quite likely provided the inspiration for the recent advert for Google Instant.
Another winning ingredient for instant Internet success is ‘cute kids’. Here’s a sweet little advert made for Samsung that begins like one of the many home movie clips littering YouTube but turns into a clever little advert that generated over 4 million views online.
Anyone who has been following KittenCamp for a while will be familiar with the Auto Tune guys by now, we think they are awesome so here’s one of their latest remixes.
One video that’s set tongues wagging and sparked debate raging across internet message boards recently is the Federer Trick Shot video that Rubber Republic produced for Gillette. Featuring a William Tell style brilliant serve by Federer that managed to knock a bottle right off a man’s head, not once but twice! Too good to be true? People love a good ‘real or fake’ debate, with the likes of GMTV and Maori TV trying to replicate the stunt and Federer even being quizzed by a Sky Sport’s journalist as to how he did it ; “A magician never reveals his tricks” was Federer’s cool response and that’s as much as we are going to say. And of course the mark of any strong meme is re-mixing – one of our favorites being this gruesome re-mix.
Now just for fun, a couple of retro themed games clips…
And because we wouldn’t want to be accused of animal favoritism, some effective use of pandas…
And finally the Dickhead Finale, just because we always used to end our show with a unicorn clip but we ran out of good ones so we found this instead, which made us laugh, A LOT!
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