Most of us know angry birds as a game to play on your mobile device when killing some time. Over the past week roughly 4 million people killed some more time watching a spoofed movie trailer for Angry Birds. This is yet another example of viral video success, and it’s not hard to see why.
Proper Timing Can Be Infectious
Angry Birds is something most of us know. Even if you have never played the game, you have likely heard about it from a friend or on the news. In fact, about a month ago Angry Birds was the talk of the online world as it’s publisher Rovio had just received 42 million in venture capital financing. Being in the headlines already gives extra juice to a viral video. I’m not saying that something completely original can’t go viral, but if you happen to piggyback off an existing popular and relevant theme, your getting a head start.
Fake Movie Trailers are Viral Gold
Movie trailers are one of the most searched things on YouTube. Spoofs and comedy are another popular topic on YT so what happens when you combine them together with a title like Angry Birds? About 4 million views in a week. Again, attaching a campaign to searchable trends will often help get a video seen.
What Came First: The Seed or the Egg
No matter what the content is, it needs to end up in a lot of places at the same time to create a true viral result. In this case, we can see that the video was seeded in several social networks, as well as getting direct references from other popular YouTube videos. The more places the video is on the web, the more people will see it/share it etc… In this case, the seed came first.
Conclusion
There isn’t really much to conclude, other than this video is an excellent example of a thoughtful, well planned viral video effort. They took the proper steps to dramatically increase the viral potential and poof: it worked. If it was a real movie, and it was really directed by Michael Bay, I would probably go see it. But cmon…Micahael Bay only directs movies with Robots fighting other Robots now. Right?
