Viral Campaigns

From the Toronto Star, November 4th, 2009.

Advertisers are marshalling the power of the viral video when they conceive of campaigns these days, Ad Agereports, using the recent Evian campaign as an example.

The French mineral water bottler released its "Live Young" campaign last summer in Canada, the U.K., Belgium, the U.S. and Japan with a video of babies on rollerskates, breakdancing and generally showing a whole lot of "attitude."

First step, posting the videos in three different versions, tailored to the international, U.S. and French markets specifically, where they went into the millions of views quickly. Second step, old-fashioned press releases, but also bloggers, Tweeters and updated videos on YouTube and Facebook.

But the ultimate step now is to blow up the magic and take everybody behind the scenes to prove that no babies were harmed in the making of what multiple views could turn into a creepy video: a two-minute-plus unveiling of the computer simulations, empty rollerskates filmed skimming down a road and dummy babies tossed about, while mothers and the real babies wait for their very brief closeups.

Babies and Evian have a history, as it turns out. Evian first used them to push its purity message in 1998 in what appeared to be a synchronized swimming routine.