Viral Ad Network

Well, it seems that our regular KittenCamp in London has made quite a name for itself, so much so that our friends up north have begun twittering about being left out of all the action! So in the interests of fairness and because Rubber Republic & the Viral Ad Network are always keen to spread more kitten love, KittenCamp packed up its tent and all its camping goodies for a little holiday in Manchester (don’t worry London Campers, we’ll be back soon!)

For anyone out there who has not yet heard of KittenCamp it’s probably not what you are thinking! It’s a monthly meet-up in London for web-loving ad industry type people to chat memes, drink beer and generally share some kitten goodness. Last week the Campers gathered at the Common Bar in Manchester’s Northern Quarter to watch Chris Quigley dress up as a giant cat (Jess out of Postman pat if anyone’s interested) and chat about some of the recent top memes.

Of course it wouldn’t be kitten camp without at least one kitten clip to supply the mandatory dose of cuteness so the show began with Slide Kitty, aaaahw!

One of my favorite clips was the recent Youtube sensation Double Rainbow Guy, whose rather intense emotional reaction to a double rainbow has generated over 7 million views and counting, coining the phrase ‘what does it mean’ and sparking a series of copycat spoof videos and remixes like the Double Rainbow Song (hilariously now available to buy on iTunes)

And the YouTube award winning Rainbow Guy Film Trailer

Of course with all the recent world cup mania, love it or hate it the trumpeting racket/tune of the Vuvuzela became the unofficial soundtrack of the games. Kicking up a lot of noise with all the bloggers out there and generating a host of goodies on youtube like Gandalf Goes to the World Cup

Hitler and the Vuvuzela at the 2010 Fifa World Cup

and a new installment of the brilliant Will it Blend?

One of the most popular brand virals of the year and top of our New Media Age Viral Chart for weeks was the Old Spice Man ad.

This genius  series of short youtube clips took the internet by storm providing a prime example of the power of Viral Seeding. The Old Spice creative team bombarded twitter, facebook and other social networking and blogging sites inviting the audience to ask questions of Mustafa’s character. They then made real time video responses to viewer’s comments posting them as replies online. This was a fantastic way to generate audience engagement and interaction with the ads, creating a story about the lead character that can continue indefinitely in future campaigns and giving everyone a chuckle along the way.

Finally the last clip of the evening was Charlie the Unicorn 3, just because we start every Camp with a kitten and end with a unicorn, don’t ask me why that’s just how it goes. For a full list of all the clips visit the Rubber Republic blog.

After some more chats and drinks that were kindly sponsored by the Viral Ad Network we were joined by our guest speaker Victoria Stansfeld from Manchester City Football Club who lead the campers on a little journey through their online site and chatted about the social strategies of the football world.

Much merriment was had by all and many interesting things were learnt. Manky KittenCamp was a great success and we promise to be back some time soon!! We would like to say a big thank you to the tweet-loving @Rebeccawho who helped organise the event and the lovely people at the Common bar, thanks for spreading the kitten love!

P.S. you can now connect with KittenCamp on Facebook, come and join the party to hear updates on future events!

Disappointed to have missed Match of the Day on Sunday evening, I thought I’d give the Superbowl a try to quench my thirst for football.

I thought I quite enjoyed American football; it is violent and exciting enough to keep my attention! However, I was soon fed up with the stop and start nature of the show. I think my mistake was watching it on the BBC where most of the program was pundits explaining the basics of the game and desperately trying to fill the time.

In the US, these gaps would have been ad breaks. The Superbowl is famous for its ads, so maybe this was what I was missing! With CBS charging about $2,700,000 for a 30 second ad, I was expecting the ads to be pretty high quality. Here’s a couple of my favourites…

$2.7m is a lot of money for an ad space. However, the Superbowl has an estimated 100 million viewers, so it works out at $0.03 a viewer – Pretty good value?

Perhaps on the surface, but are these viewers all engaging with the content? These viewers could be making tea, paying the pizza delivery guy, or if they are female, completely disengaged by the huge number of male-orientated ads!

To counter this drain of U.S. ad spend, here at the Viral Ad Network we are running a special offer. For February only, we are doing a deal on U.S. targeted campaigns. We’re giving 2500 away views for free when you spend $999 on 5000 views through the network.

Check out our offer here

We’ve developed up some quick tips and models to help PR agencies guarantee maximum viral views / buzz around your campaigns across blogs and social internet, using our Viral Ad Network (VAN).

Check out our quick tips here below:

Using the Viral Ad Network, we can guarantee awareness and views of your digital PR campaign content across our network of 100’s of blogs at the click of the button – with you paying on a simple “cost per engagement” basis, meaning full transparency to you and your client – all recorded in a live results dashboard online.

Check out our quick viral planning tool, so you can plan your viral / social media campaign and get a sense of what you can achieve with your budget!

Of otherwise, drop our team a quick note!  info@viraladnetwork.net

Reading through the RubberRepublic blog, I thought I’d point the whole of team rubber at the article on the semantics of the word “viral” when applied to marketing.

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”).

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My Best is Electrabel

Electrabe’s pixilation using 288,000 individual candles. Pixilation and stop motion techniques have been around since the 1900’s. The techniques seam to be growing in popularity, with all the new technology and software that has made these techniques available to any person in their bedroom. It is pushing creatives to think harder and for the final creation to prove beyond doubt that a lot of time was spent on this! This reminds me of all those domino rallies in the 80’s, there must be an universal fascination with finicky tasks that take up a lot of time. When it works it looks like Electrabel and when it tries to hard it’s “Happy New Year! (2009) in HD”

My not so best is Happy New Year! (2009)

This guy having a go in his room is commendable FlippyCat’s channel has 1,026,401 views and currently the 5th most viewed all time for Canada.

Which is the more successful new years message?