Week 36 Viral Brand Videos: Herbal Essence knocks the socks off while Toyota plays it safe.

With hundreds of videos being uploaded to YouTube each second of each day, you might think that filtering out not just the viral videos but viral videos from brands would be an impossible mission. But over here at Unmetric, the task is a piece of cake. It’s amazing how patterns surface each week and yet the individual videos manage to be so different from the last.

The top 5 videos of this week are all TVCs and are all under 30 seconds. Though many brands have seen success from uploading longer form YouTube content rather than just adding TVCs, these adverts (which have probably been promoted) are the lucky charm that seems to have broken past records for these brands.

#1: Herbal Essences Airplane Commercial: Reintroducing the Smooth & Shine Collection

Herbal Essence brings back its Smooth and Shine collection and Nicole Scherzinger (their brand ambassador) washes her hair in a flight’s bathroom while making climaxing sounds to promote it (Why oh why did I forget my headphones today of all days?! Several of my colleagues gave accusational glares because of the sound my laptop was making). There you go, I summarized the video in a single line. While I was a little taken aback by the video and lost faith in humanity for a while, my male friends seemed to appreciate it a bit more and seemed to know all about Herbal Essences’ past form at creating such videos. The video was viewed more than 50,000 times in the last week.

http://youtu.be/yMVFL9JTFoo

#2: L’Oréal Paris Triple Resist with Jennifer Lopez (:15)

After Herbal Essences’ bordering on an NSFW video, L’Oreal Paris’ commercial for their hair care range was a life saver. A good old fashioned shampoo ad like it should be – brand ambassador (Jennifer Lopez in this case) showing off her computer perfected hair. The seventeen second ad flashes shots of JLo and also manages to stuff in every product feature.

http://youtu.be/4qx8CwPVDmU

#3: Eye Studio® Master Smoky™ Longwearing Shadow-Pencil TV Commercial

Just when I thought I’d had my share of personal care products for the day, Maybelline’s ad popped up. Being one of the women having a hard time arriving at the perfect smoke-y look, this new eye pencil definitely caught my eye (pun intended). The 16 second advert also doubles as a tutorial, but is it enough to make me have a quick run to the store to buy the Master Smoky?

#4: HomeGoods TV Spot: Storage Ottoman

Moving on from personal care products, it’s time for some Home Goods. A cute storage ottoman which is also a center table? Looks like am going to have to run to the store again. This video, from Home Goods, is again a no frills, to the point advert. The video received almost 6,000 views in less than two days and is a demonstration of Unmetric’s viral filters – it’s not about the views, but the growth of views based on past history. In this case, Home Goods has never had a video perform quite like this.

http://youtu.be/ygcTTS8NSh8

#5: Toyota Let’s Go Places. Safely. — “Let’s”

This simple yet heart warming video from Toyota strings together little instances from everyday life that all of us probably witness. The slogan “Let’s go places-Safely” sets the perfect theme to insert the feature of the car seamlessly in to the advert. My favorite part is the voice over, it adds an elegance to the already beautiful concept. The video received over 100,000 views in just a couple of days.

http://youtu.be/FbUuYT8frR8

There is no doubt that TVCs do pretty well for many brands and are definitely easier to promote. But this does not mean that brands will not be as successful with the bold, out-of-the-box content. The YouTube channels of many brands need a lot of spicing up and experimenting with off beat genres is definitely a great place to start.
That’s all for today folks. Watch this space for more!

Methodology

All data has been compiled and analyzed from the Unmetric platform which tracks dozens of metrics to enable brands to benchmark themselves against competitors and their industry sector. Gain access to all this data by claiming a 6 day free trial.