Julian Ferreira knew something was up when a bunch of his employees carried a few car loads of equipment out of his Calgary camera store the other weekend. But it wasn’t until the following Monday, when they asked him to sit down and watch a video they’d made, that he had any idea of what was going on.
“They plunked some headphones on me and said: ‘Now watch and don’t say anything until it’s over,’” said Mr. Ferreira, the operations manager of The Camera Store. “I just laughed and laughed, I had tears coming down my face by the time I’d finished.” So, apparently, did many others. Because within a day of the video’s appearance on YouTube, tens of thousands had shared it with their friends. A little over one week later, it’s racked up more than one million views.
'Battle at F-Stop Ridge' is a wry and wordless one-minute send-up of war movies, in which half a dozen photography buffs enact a scene of trench warfare armed with their cameras, the soundtrack dominated by a machine gun-like rat-a-tat-tat of three-frames-per-second shooting.
And while every marketer seems to want a viral video to add to their list of achievements (if only to impress the CEO), the success of F-Stop alongside a number of other recent Canadian-born projects suggests that only clients who give their agencies more creative freedom are likely to reach their target audiences with viral videos.
“I’m 50-something-years-old, from a different generation than these guys,” noted Mr. Ferreira. “They see it as fun and cutting-edge and I think to a degree you have to say, ‘You know what? It is their generation’s product, if they think that’s what they should be doing and that’s what’s going to catch their attention, maybe we should listen to it and go – okay.’ In this case, they obviously hit the right buttons.”
So has a five-minute video about – of all things – malignant melanoma. Dear 16-Year-Old Me is a quietly wrenching public service announcement in which a handful of cancer survivors, family members, and physicians speak directly to the camera about their experience with the disease. Produced by the small Toronto outpost of Evidently, which calls itself a content creation agency, it has been seen more than 1.7 million times since being posted in early May.
But is it truly viral? Like many other online success stories, its growth has come in part from coverage by mainstream media. Calling something viral, meanwhile, originated in the literature of epidemiology as a way of characterizing the qualities that allow it, like a contagious disease, to be spread by one-to-one contact. It’s an important distinction, because person-to-person sharing reflects a tight web of social connections, and is believed to speak to the intensity of the passion that people feel for the video or its message.
One new video which seems to clearly qualify was designed as a riff on the phenomenon of viral videos. Charlie Bit My Finger: The Horror is a 1 minute and 40-second scene of zombie terror commissioned by the Toronto agency Doug & Serge to advertise the Canadian Film Centre’s Worldwide Short Film Festival, which kicks off next Monday.
It plays on the popularity of Charlie Bit My Finger -- Again , a 56-second home movie of a British infant chomping on his older brother’s finger, which has been viewed more than 325 million times since being posted five years ago. The simplicity of that video led the Doug & Serge creative team to come up with the tagline for their campaign, which comprises three short films: “Anyone can upload. Few can direct.”
