Derek Vaughan

Top 10 Viral Video Ads

Every Internet marketer has successes and failures, but the true goal of any campaign placed on the Internet is to get it to go viral. Viral means that viewers get so inspired, excited, or passionate about your marketing piece that they enthusiastically recommend it to anyone they know who will listen. Over the past few years several hosting companies have launched campaigns that they hoped would go viral. For example, there is the absolutely brilliant campaign concieved by Aaron Phillips - formerly of FastServers - where he sent video cameras to clients and asked for testimonials. Check out the Tom Green video on the page. Go Daddy tries every year to create a viral stir with its unreleased Super Bowl ads. Then there is a recently launched campaign from UK hosting company, 34SP.com. The Pub Mashup Contest is a micro site looking for coders to contribute a mashup that has to do with, er, pubs.

So how then do we get an Internet marketing campaign to go viral? One source of inspiration may be to analyze the current top viral ads and look for common threads. But where to get such a list of top video ads?

Fortunately for online marketers there is an online service at Visible Measures which rates the top viral video ads each week. Below are the top ads for this week - along with my analysis of why the video has gone viral. Fair warning - watching all the ads will take up about half an hour of your time. These ideas may inspire your next online marketing venture. Enjoy!

Number 10 - Extreme Sheep LED Art - Combines real life activity (sheepherding) with animation to create a "NO WAY!" experience for the viewer. The viral hook is the unusual nature of the activity plus the obvious impossibility of the results.

Number 9 - Cadbury Eyebrows - Although this video has been around for a while it continues to grow in momentum. As above it uses very slick and subtle animation to give a very "real life" feel to something that is animated (eyebrow movements). The movements themselves aren't really that interesting - but ad hip-hop music and the balloon noises. It's just over the top funny! This one proves once again - we like humor.

Number 8 - BONTRUST Money Love - WARNING Adult Themed - This great animation uses humor once again plus the personification of money doing what's necessary to multiply.

Number 7 - Coca Cola Open Happiness - Clever and truly different. This video uses what I call the "cute factor" to sell. There's also an element of curiosity as you wonder what's going to happen.

Number 6 - YouTube HD Camera Trick Challenge (Revealed) - Samsung keeps up the momentum here with a double impact: a very clever visual trick which showcases the video quality of their camera and a "How did we do it?" element which led to a big build up for the reveal.

Number 5 - Sing-a-long in Trafalgar Square for T-Mobile - This just seems to me to be a simple matter of taking one of the best Beatles songs of all time and using it in an ad. Can't fail.

Number 4 - T-Mobile Dance - Similar to above but dancing instead of singing. I guess its sort of interesting to see a bunch of people dancing all at once in a train station.

Number 3 - Frito Lay Woman's World - This video is one of a series that was produced by Frito Lay for women in mid-life. The writing and the jokes (humor once again) are spot on for the demographic, and the continuity of the series keeps one engaged.

Number 2 - Nike Most Valuable Puppets - Take an NBA icon, turn him into a puppet, then have him stomp around getting pumped up for the playoffs. Oh yeah, also add some (you guessed it) humor. Stir well.

And the Number 1 Viral Video Ad this week is - Vodafone Make the Most of Now - Another series featuring a cartoonish character who just seems to bring on trouble. Humor - but dark humor plays a big role here.

I hope that these videos give you some marketing inspiration. As noted, humor is the dominant theme this week in our viral videos. Look for another crop of viral videos coming soon.

The Google Outage According to Twitter

News flash - Google suffered an outage. You wouldn't have been able to read that information on Google News though, it was down too. In fact, from all indications every single major Google service was broken for a while yesterday. And that spelled trouble for any web hosting company that uses Google Analytics. That's because since Google Analytics is hosted by Google, with code embedded in the web hosts' website and potentially the order form. The effect is a slow down in site performance and ultimately - orders. If you want to see a graphical representation of just how huge our dependence on Google is - check out this graph on bandwidth usage from Wired Magazine.

One host that saw the effects of the Google outage firsthand was UK hosting company 34SP.com. According to co-founder Daniel Foster the Google outage was not directly affecting in-house activities, but saw the website suffer slow loading times, ''We could access Google fine from our offices in Manchester, but we began to see evidence that clients were having some slowdown in page loads on our website for a brief period. We really figured out there was a bigger issue with Google when we checked Twitter.''

And so the world - having been deprived of all things Google - quickly turned to Twitter.com. Comments ranged from the banal to the ridiculous, and everything in-between. At one point yesterday Tweets for the search phrase 'Google down' were accruing at the rate of 226 per minute. Since the Twitter interface allows for only 15 tweets to be displayed at a time, there is just no way that anyone could possibly have been keeping up with the chatter on this subject as it happened. Additionally, it is difficult to access archived Twitter search results. So for those of you that missed it - here are a few of the choicest tweets reprinted from Twitter - randomly sampled during the outage yesterday. Enjoy!

''My life has come to a complete halt. Google is down.''

''When Skynet becomes self-aware it'll take down Google along with the missile silos. We wouldn't know what to do wo either of them.''

''Things to do while Google is down: flee, panic, tweet (until Twitter buckles), buy lots of canned corn for the pending apocalypse.''

''GOOGLE IS DOWN! EVERYBODY PANIC!!!''

'' Google is down, my day is screwed.''

''google is down!! its broken!! i feel like i should be looting and rioting in the streets. no email for me this morning....''

''Damn you Google for slowing down the whole internet! Every site using Google Analytics has trouble loading''

''Since all of Google is down, I've used Yahoo search for the first time... it's secretly not that bad''

''I was going to search for news articles about Google being down, but I only use Google News''

''Google's down. Aren't you glad Google didn't buy Twitter?''

So what actually happened to cause the outage? You can read the official Google explanation here. It seems that Google errantly routed it's traffic through Asia.

HostingCon Speakers Selected

I have been a speaker at every single edition of HostingCon since its inception. Thanks to an email that I received the other day my string will be unbroken. The email read in part:

''Congratulations! You have been selected as a speaker at HostingCon 2009! HostingCon 2009, the premier conference and trade show for the hosted services industry, is also where the best and brightest from the industry are coming to learn the latest news, ideas, and technology affecting their businesses. This year we had over 120 speaker proposals! The supply of great topics and the level of expertise among the potential speakers was outstanding and made the selection process very difficult. The outcome; however, is an exceptional program with diverse and timely topics and actionable substance.''

For those of you not familiar with HostingCon - it is a great conference and show devoted entirely to the web hosting industry. I attend every year, and each year the show seems to get even better. The WHIR are also great supporters of the show through their media sponsorship. I asked WHIR editor Liam Eagle what he thinks is valuable about HostingCon and he responded (in part anyway - I had to edit down his answer - sorry Liam), ''As a key media sponsor, we benefit from attending HostingCon in a lot of ways that may not translate directly to the average attendee. On the one hand, we get a lot of great exposure among attendees from being involved as a sponsor. Our magazine is distributed in the attendee packages, for instance. And we have made a yearly tradition of sponsoring a "networking lounge" on the tradeshow floor, which has become a great venue for one-on-one interaction with anyone who wants to come and talk to us.''

In terms of what is a good reason for a hosting professional to attend - Liam added, ''I'll give one reason, but you can extrapolate it and apply it to whatever other subject you want. I'm going to use cloud computing, because it's the biggest issue in the hosting business right now. Call it a "sea change" or a "disruptive technology" or a "buzzword" or whatever you want, but this is the thing that's going to have the biggest impact on the business you're in (assuming you're in the hosting business) in the next couple of years - even the next year. But, while a select few people hold very concrete opinions about what that's going to involve technology-wise or, say, marketing-wise, those notion's aren't necesarily the same. And they're not necessarily easy to pick out of the general media hype surrounding cloud computing.''

Here are what a couple of other industry professionals had to say about HostingCon.

Joe Bardenheier is VP, Corporate Development with Endurance International and his thoughts echoed those of many I have spoken with and contacted regarding this year's show, ''HostingCon continues to be a great place to meet and greet the important companies in the hosting industry. We were able to conduct many important meetings all with in a three day period in one place.''

Stuart Melling is a co-founder of UK hosting company, 34SP.com. Mr. Melling has attended HostingCon for the past 4 years and had this to say about last year's show, ''Last year's event helped us to focus on how we as a company where going to move forward in 2009. While we already had plans, this unique event allowed us to talk with vendors, competitors, analysts and so forth. The varied viewpoints really clarified for us, what the next year and beyond would see in terms of threats and opportunities. We have made some exciting changes and are seeing the benefits now.''

David Snead is a well known web hosting attorney and frequent contributor to The WHIR blog. David and I will be presenting together this year at HostingCon. Here is what David prognosticates for HostingCon 2009, ''There is a renewed energy this year, and a focus on quality speakers. In particular, there will be a nice mix of policy speakers and nuts and bolts advice. As the event has grown, and I assume will continue to grow, the networking opportunities can't be beat.''

I hope to see you at HostingCon 2009 in Washington, D.C. To learn more about the event or to register, please visit: http://www.hostingcon.com.

Cisco to Enter the Web Server Market

It is widely reported and expected that within the next 24 hours networking and communications technology company Cisco will announce its entry into the blade server market, thus extending its expertise and revenue from switches and routers in the data center to web servers. The original speculation regarding this move began to emerge in January after a blog post by Padmasree Warrior on the official Cisco blog about something that Cisco calls ''Unified Computing''. Just what is this? According to Cisco, ''Unified Computing is the advancement toward the next generation data center that links all resources together in a common architecture to reduce the barrier to entry for data center virtualization. In other words, the compute and storage platform is architecturally ''unified'' with the network and the virtualization platform.''

It seems as if Cisco is interested in providing a standardized data center platform which will serve as a foundation for software advancements in virtualization. One wonders if this is a play to more or less ''own'' the data center - and if the other web server players will simply roll over and let Cisco have this lucrative marketplace.

Why is this move by Cisco such a threat to current data center web server vendors? Consider these facts, Cisco is both huge and hugely successful. Cisco currently has a market capitalization of around $90 billion. The company employs over 68,000 employees and has annual revenues of over $39 billion. In March of the year 2000, at the height of the dot-com boom, Cisco was the most valuable company in the world, with a market capitalization of more than $500 billion. It is still among the largest and most successful technology companies in the world. The vast bulk of its revenues and market leadership have come within the data center in the form of switches, routers and networking gear. Now the company has apparently set its sites on web servers.

The companies that now stand directly in the path of the Cisco server tsunami are IBM, HP and Dell. These are all companies that manufacture web servers and for the most part do not compete in routers and switches. Additionally, rivals in the router and switch market such as Juniper Networks may find themselves suddenly shut out of a proprietary system constructed by Cisco which necessitates the use of only Cisco hardware and software. One company that stands to gain is VMware. That is because it is reported that VMware virtualization software will become the software platform for the new system.

Daniel Foster, co-founder of UK website hosting company 34SP.com thinks that Cisco will make a bold move if it chooses the server path, ''34SP.com uses Cisco switches exclusively. The company has proven itself a leader in data center components and software. If they do decide to move into manufacturing web servers, they will have a direct path to the data center buyer via their current products - that makes them a force to be reckoned with.''

Stifel Nicolaus analyst Sanjiv Wadhwani was quoted by the Associated Press on Friday after meeting with a Cisco executive that ''Cisco is about to announce a server code-named ''California'' as part of a package for data centers. It's designed to integrate with VMware Inc.'s virtualization software, which lets one computer act like several machines. That technology is already reshaping data centers. ''California'' is in the ''blade'' category - thin, relatively low-end servers that can be rack-mounted in great numbers - and is powered by Intel Corp. chips, Wadhwani believes. ''Cisco's goal is to radically change the way data centers are designed, built and operated,'' Wadhwani wrote in a research note.''

Look for more information over the next 24 hours from Cisco on their web server plans.

WebhostingDay Nearly Sold Out

According to event organizer, Thomas Strohe, the fifth annual installment of WebhostingDay is nearly at full capacity. This is quite a shock, given the current state of the world economy and the fact that the conference is still weeks away. WebhostingDay 2009 is slated to be held from March 18 to 20, 2009 at Phantasialand in Bruehl near Cologne, Germany. Mr. Strohe has confirmed that there are currently over 2,000 attendees pre-registered for the event. This represents an 80 percent increase over last year's conference. Additionally, the venue itself holds only 2,300 people, indicating that this year's WebhostingDay event will sell out.

I am planning on attending this year, and I came to find out a couple of weeks ago that the primary hotels inside the park for the event were already full. Therefore, the only rooms currently available are those about 2 kilometers away from the event. It is likely that these rooms will be completely reserved soon as well. The bottom line for anyone desiring to attend WebhostingDay 2009 is this: get signed up right away or risk not being able to get a spot.

There are a number of WHIR-connected folks attending or presenting at the show this year. Among them is fellow WHIR blogger, David Snead. Here is a bit of what David had to say about Webhosting Day 2009, ''I went to WebhostingDay last year and found it to be a great compliment to HostingCon - as far as business development. I wanted to be a part of this year's event because I believed I could add to the success of the program by presenting an educational legal seminar. I will also use this time to meet with European clients. I find that meeting with clients - at their offices - leads to a much more substantial exchange of ideas than talks over the phone, or over coffee at a conference.'' Click here to see an outline of David's Snead's Webhosting Day presentation

First time web hosting conference attendee, Phil Robinson, runs the programming and design function for UK based business hosting company 34SP.com. Mr. Robinson commented on his expectations for this year's Webhosting Day event, ''The guys here at 34SP.com have always spoken fondly of hosting conferences and seemed to find a great deal of inspiration and energy from their rich content. Obviously when they offered to send me to Webhosting Day I accepted and became excited about meeting like minded people, learning more about the industry we work in and visiting Bruehl for the first time.''

Event organizer Mr. Strohe added, ''This year's event has some interesting new features, for example CloudCamp, an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing come together. CloudCamp is held parallel to WebhostingDay's second day and its attendees may also take part in all of the Webhosting Day events.''

The content and excitement around this year's Webhosting Day are great - so sign up now or simply read about what happened here at The WHIR in a few weeks.