Top 3 Viral Videos That Are Really Marketing Hoaxes A comedy article
by John Hargrave 116,460 19 08/21/2009 05:59 PM 7709 views
Modern advertising agencies, desperate to have their ads stand out in the chaos created by modern advertising agencies, have turned to viral videos as their new medium of choice. The appeal of viral videos is their Joe Everyman quality, their "little guy with a big message," so ad agencies must carefully hide the fact that these are expensive, highly-produced videos designed to prank the public into buying a product.
Sometimes they succeed ... but not for long. The collective detective work on the Internet is usually enough to uncover the truth within days. But if the original video is funny, bizarre, or insane enough, it can still rack up millions of views. And so we present to you the Top 3 Viral Videos That Are Really Marketing Hoaxes, in order of most-viewed.
1) Guy Catches Glasses With Face (4.3 million views to date). A thirtysomething guy throws a pair of sunglasses at his friend, who effortlessly catches them on his face -- not just once, but seven times. The tricks increase in difficulty, with his friend catching the sunglasses from a moving skateboard, a moving car, and then dropped from a bridge.
The video is incredibly weird, because you're sure it can't be real, and yet you can't figure out how it could be faked. Are they pulling the glasses off his face, then running the clip backward? (They how did they get them in the other guy's hand?) Is it all some kind of AfterEffects trick? (Then how did they get the motion of the glasses just right?) Is the guy really able to catch glasses with his face? (Then why doesn't he have a talk show?)
The video was created through an elaborate series of trick camera techniques, which are deconstructed in the following video by a superhero called Captain Disillusion (who is not an actual superhero but a guy wearing silver face paint -- sorry to disillusion you).
But how many pairs of sunglasses did the viral video sell for Ray-Ban? Well, here's a look at the stock performance for Luxottica, Ray-Ban's parent company, over the last two years that they've been releasing these videos:
Actual Luxottica financials, 6/07-3/09
So from the numbers, I'd say they've sold about 12.
2) MEGAWOOSH (2.5 million views to date). A man in a neoprene suit sits at the top of a huge, homemade water slide that ends in a massive ramp. As his assistants pour water onto the slide, he launches down the slide and off the ramp at an incredible speed, sailing 100 feet before landing in a kiddie pool.
Again, this is one of those visual sight gags that seems too crazy to be true. And again, you can drive yourself mental trying to think about what manner of CGI trickery could have created this video. You're left holding a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in cheese and smothered in bacon -- especially since there is no obvious company behind this. What would they be selling -- head injuries?
The truth: It's a viral video created for, inexplicably, Microsoft Germany to promote Microsoft Project 2007. With an elaborate backstory involving a fake Web site about a German inventor and his super-slippery suit, the video is a composite of several shots: a stuntman on a slide, an animated body flying through the air, and an actor jumping into the pool from a wooden platform.
Here's a quick clip of the stuntman starting the slide, which is pretty lame in comparison:
What does this have to do with the bloated, confusing project management software called Microsoft Project? Not a frickin clue. In many ways, the slide is the opposite of Project: it's easy, frictionless, and actually works. If the water slide were Project, it would branch off into an incomprehensible mess of hundreds of mini-slides, all leading to one project manager trying desperately to finish the water slide himself at 2:00 am on a Sunday.
You need all this to say, "Get your Shakespeare done before you leave for the weekend."
3. Guy Catches Laptop With His Butt (1.6 million views to date). It's a ripoff of the sunglasses formula, but reengineered from the bottom up: a team of acrobats (or "acrobutts") do crazy tricks while the lead performer catches a laptop between his taut, firm buttocks. This video, more than any other, shows the profound shift the advertising industry is going through. Just a few years ago, having someone associate their ass with your product would have been considered a bad thing.
The truth: it's a video for MSI, the Taiwainese computer manufacturer, and their new lightweight, ass-friendly X-Slim series of laptops. MSI's agency used similar trickery to the Ray-Ban video above, with a few new techniques (see if you can spot the greenscreen shot). Not only are the butt-catches fake, but the laptops are fake as well. The junk in their leotards -- well, you can decide for yourself on that one.
The jury is out.
It's the cheekiest of all the viral videos, to be sure, and you wonder what marketing exec would have approved this without being incredibly drunk. And yet, it's turned out to be a brilliant marketing move -- everyone's talking about the X-Slim laptops, including us, right now, in this sentence.
Once we've passed the conceptual barrier of products being featured in people's asscracks, there's really no limit to where ad agencies can go next. So next time you see a viral video featuring a Nazi kangaroo urinating on a pile of rotting meat, just tell yourself: it's probably a commercial.
116,460 
19 
Share on your site:
18 
1
