Attention in viral marketing and YouTube- Coca-cola example

Speaking of viral marketing video, I immediately think "Coca-Cola Happiness Truck" my supervisor mentioned when I was working in a public relations company. It is a big red ruck with a PUSH button at the back. People get curious and push the button. Could you guess what happened?

It is obvious that this video is made by Coca-cola company as a marketing strategy. However, the interesting thing is, people not only get coca-cola, but also other items such as sunglasses, soccer balls and surfboards. All people have happy smiles on their faces, which shows the message- Coca-cola brings people happiness. Audience were caught by the "surprise" and "fun" elements in the video.


Although the number of viewers (about one million) may not be significant, there are people leaving comments every day since 18 Feb 2011. Of course, the Coca-cola happiness truck did not only go to Brazil, but many other countries such as the Philippines and even Hong Kong. Many videos has this sentence at the end "Where Will Happiness Strike Next?" and people left comments to show that they want the coca-cola happiness truck to be in their countries, as can be seen in the picture below.

By giving attention of the public, it also receives attention from all over the world. Many websites talk about this video because the web-users simply love this idea. The intended audience is people all over the world. Around 50 percent of viewers were from outside the United States and more than 70 percent of blog posts about the video were in languages other than English. Coca-cola company does not need to send a happiness truck to every city of the world to promote. They only need to post it on Youtube and people could browse it and thus to gain exposure. The media keeps growing with the development of technological products, as shown from the statistics on the left, 67, 869 people first viewed this video from a mobile device. Coca-cola also used a Facebook Hub to gain attention of the public, apart from the video clips in Youtube.



The results of the campaign was quite impressive. A total of three million views were recorded for this campaign in YouTube. But I think Coca-cola could have achieved more by getting more audience. Why couldn't it? I thought of the ways the company could further promote their products and videos, and I remembered the video that was shown in class, "An anthropological introduction to YouTube" (please watch it from 7:18). It mentions that people will view digg.com and delicious.com which are websites that increase the number of audience. I checked out the digg.com and delicious.com to find out why the "Coca-Cola Happiness Truck" could not be as popular as it could be. Digg.com only shows the most popular videos in the last 18 hours, whereas not many bookmarks are tagged for "coca-cola happiness truck" on delicious.com. This is why the videos could only gain attention for the first month since its first upload and thereafter the audience grows very slowly.

 

It is a pity that this interesting video could not gain very significant attention on YouTube globally. Yet many people have positive opinions after watching this video and it succeeded in catching their attention by its creativity. I wish I could press the "PUSH" button!