Viral Videos: Everyone’s Got the Fever

It has been difficult to ignore the increase in viral video ad campaigns lately. If you haven’t noticed, viral videos have become a powerful advertising strategy for many corporations. Volkswagen created The Fun Theory, MicroBilt sponsors I Love Local Commercials, and Evian’s creepy roller skating babies helped make their Live Young campaign a viral success. A cleverly disguised T-Mobile advertisement does a great job at mimicking those low-quality, flash-mob-caught-on-tape videos. It takes two and-a-half minutes of watching the video before you realize you’ve been duped into watching an advertisement.

So, is this it? Is this the end of homemade viral videos? Can we even begin to compete with the millions of dollars that go into making and promoting these corporate viral video ad campaigns? Should we even bother?

Time Magazine’s recent article, YouTube Effect: Making Money from Viral Video, discusses the recent success people have had with their homemade viral videos. The makers of Keyboard Cat and David After Dentist, among others, have seized various opportunities to further market their successful videos, enabling them to earn tens of thousands of dollars each.

It’s becoming quite obvious that video-sharing sites and social media have become great tools for raking in the dough. And yes, corporations have figured this out, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we should just give up and allow Keyboard Cat to play us off, does it?