Creativity a must for viral success

Creativity is critical for advertising because it has the power to engage and motivate people. 

Therefore, when planning a viral campaign creativity is a critical ingredient to drive success.

The problem with creativity it is highly subjective, making it hard to evaluate.  

Picture this…. your advertising agency pitches a BIG IDEA to you, your marketing team and your Chief Executive Officer.  They say, “this is a big creative idea that we think will be hugely successful”.  

But you're not sure.... it's really an 'out there' concept.  

But, your boss doesn't like it and wants to reject the idea!

Do you - reject the idea because, after all your boss is right? Or do you evaluate it against a set of criteria and convince your boss that according to this criteria it is the right way to proceed?  Hopefully the later! In reality lots of companies proceed with advertising based on personal judgement.  

So what can you do to make sure this doesn't happen to you?

Let’s have a look at three highly successful campaigns that have generated millions of views.  For this purpose I have used audience reach as the key indicator of success.  Then I'll evaluate the ads using an advertising creativity predictive model developed by Stuhlfaut and Yoo, (2013). The model establishes that advertising creativity has four dimensions: novelty, affective, utility and humorous and a unique set of 15 characteristics.

Lets see how they stack up….

1. Three highly successful viral campaigns

  Dynamite Surfing (Quiksilver)

• With a reputed 10 million views a couple of months after the launch this viral advert for Quiksilver took the web by storm and did more to promote the brand than all their other advertising combined.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR_naKxLEPc

    Test Your Awareness: Whodunnit? (TFL cycling safety)

• In just 3 months over 3.8 million people viewed this video making it one of the top viral campaigns of 2008.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubNF9QNEQLA

 Cadbury’s Gorilla

• Another recent great example of a highly successful viral campaign was Cadbury’s. 2007 ad featuring the gorilla playing the drums and has been seen by over 7 million viewers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnzFRV1LwIo

2. Introducing the advertising creativity evaluation tool

Just to give you some background to the tool I am using.  In 2013 Stuhlfaut et al., conducted research into advertising creativity and developed a tool to evaluate advertising concepts.  Their research showed that highly creative advertising had four dimensions – novelty, utility, affect and humour and 15 characteristics.

• Novelty is measured by being original, imaginative, innovating, unique, new, surprising.
• Affective is measured by whether is emotionally engaging and likable.
• Utility is measured by whether the advertising is meaningful, persuasive, relevant, and strategic and memorable.
• And the final dimension is whether the ad is humorous. 

 3. The evaluation! 

I evaluated each ad and assessed it against Stuhlfaut et at’s., characteristics that predict advertising creativity.  For simplicity I placed a “Y” in the box if I believed the ad met the criteria of that characteristic.

As you can see by the results below each ad shared a number of similar characteristics, namely: imaginative, unique, surprising, likeable, meaningful, persuasive, relevant, strategic and memorable.

What’s more interesting, is that ‘Dynamic Surfing’ attracted the largest number of views and also hit the largest number of predictive characteristics.  The least successful of the three ads being, ‘Do the Test’, only managed to achieve 9 out of the 15 predictive characteristics.  However that was still enough to generate a significant result.

4. The insight

Creativity is a critical component for a viral advertising campaign to be successful.  You can predict, and or evaluate, the success of your viral campaign by using Stuhlfaut et al’s., creative advertising predictive model. 

So next time you are developing a creative brief or assessing a campaign consider using this great, simple predictive creative advertising model. 

Your campaign will surely be a viral hit!

Stuhlfaut M. W. and Chan Y Yoo., (2013), "A tool for evaluating advertising concepts: desirable characteristics as viewed by creative practitioners", Journal for Marketing Communications, 17 (1), 1-17.