First we had to create consent forms in order to publish the information we gathered from our interviews.After gaining our participants permission, we continued on with the questions. I won't go into detail with regards to individual answers and information collected, but the following were our generalised finds, along with patterns we began to spot.
The first question, asking if the participant recognised how many, if any of a selection of adverts was an example of a viral ad, got mixed results. A third of participants however, recognised that the "Visit California" advert was in fact not viral. Others recognised the advert, although were unable to determine which were viral and which were not.
The second question was in regards to Cadburys recent and currently ongoing viral campaign. After asking how they felt after seeing a selection of them, we found that the general response was that they were confused. Often they were unsure as to how the content relates to selling a product, although all recognised the videos themselves.
Thirdly, we asked why they think companies would chose to use seemingly irrelevant content in adverts, to which the general response was to make their product more fun, memorable or enjoyable.
On asking what music was used during a selection of mobile phone service providers adverts, we were left with an interesting array of answers. Although it was a bit of a trick question due to the fact that only one contained music, it was interesting to find that sost could not remember much about the content for Orange or O2 at all (the two with no music at all), however nearly all knew that a) T-Mobile was based around music and b) could name songs used (albeit not necessarily the ones used for the specific advert we had muted). It was interesting to find that a connection was made between the audio and memory.
Next, we asked if any of the people involved in our interviews could remember what the series of adverts was, or indeed the tag line used throughout for the new Windows 7 operating system. Although a few had no idea, a few of the male participants knew selected bits of them. Some knew the tagline was "I'm a PC and.." and some other knew they were short snappy ads. Here are the actual ads we were referring to:
There are several others available on YouTube from the same series.
It was interesting to find that more males than females remembered this type of advertisement. It's hard to say wether it is because of the quick delivery of the adverts that entices males over females, or if it is the content relating to computers, as computers are commonly regarded as being more interesting to males than females.
Lastly, we played only the audio of an advert, and asked if they could tell us what it was for within the first few seconds - being careful not to reveal the product name that is mentioned towards the beginning. Nearly all of them instantly named it, with the remaining one who did not name it being unable to put their finger on the exact product, although said they did recognise it.
This was the advert we used:
The conclusion we drew from our answers was that the reasons viral advertisements are successful is because in most cases, people remember the content and as a connected result, remember the brand. When a continuous style of unrelated content is used, a style is created, thus becoming part of the brand itself. An example of this is the continuous use of purple throughout Cadbury's adverts, the bright colourful fun extraordinary things that happen throughout Sony's Bravia adverts, or Honda's intellectual use of sound. As this becomes the standard for a brand, the products themselves are less and less important as by now the viewer knows that Cadbury's make chocolate, and Sony makes technological products. It's far beyond that stage.
Basically, the theory behind it is to make you remember them, and from our findings - most of these adverts do just that.
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