‘Viraler and viraler’: Fake ad promises to make your video viral
John St., the Canadian advertising agency that brought you the YouTube hits “Catvertising” and “Pink Ponies: A Case Study” is back with a new ad for Buyral, a (fake) service that promises to use a network of clickers to help your Web video go viral.
“The viral video. Millions of views. Millions in sales,” a warm male voice says as the video begins. “What’s their secret? What made them go viral? We did.”
As the camera pans across a room filled with people, he ads, “It’s simple. Now you can pay for the clicks you need to make your video go viral.”
It just gets funnier from there. The fake advertisement tells us that Buyral has an outreach program for the elderly and a L’il Clicker program for school kids. An executive says the company is constantly working on new ideas, helping videos to go “viraler and viraler.”
“Once we bypassed the viewing process our world opened up, anywhere there is a button we can collect clicks,” he says. “Elevators, pin pads, whack-a-mole.... One day we won’t need the viewer.”
The joke continues on a Buyral website, where you’ll find a pricing plan that is very attractive. (The best deal is 25 million views for just 59.99 in Canadian dollars).
John St. has a history of striking a chord with its fake advertisements. In November 2011 the agency put up a video called “Catvertising” in which it stated that it would focus entirely on making cat videos.
In the beginning of 2012 the company’s video “Pink Ponies: A Case Study” was an exploration of how the John St. used forward thinking advertising strategies to put together a little girl’s birthday party.
The unfunny part about the Buyral ad is that though it is fake, there are many companies that do sell views on YouTube videos. My colleagues David Sarno and Jack Leonard worked with two of these companies to generate more than 60,000 views of a video of paint drying on a wall.
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