As it is known in the advertising sphere, the unique selling proposition (USP) is indeed the most important issue that the agency and the client want the viewers to remember after they’ve seen/heard the advertisement. In the early fifties, Rosser Reeves developed this concept at TED Bates advertising agency. The idea of USP was that every single brand had something that could distinguish them from their competitors. Hence, this powerful unique element could be easily turned into the added value of the campaign.

This idea came about 70 years ago. I think it’s about time to rephrased it according to the new age of viral video marketing.

As well know the future of online video advertising is already here, and we should learn from the past in order to take the best advantages from the tools we get the opportunity to use in the future. UPS is one of them.

In my opinion, the spread of viral videos have two reasons of happening
1) The fact of being funny, engaging and letting the consumers identify with it.
2) The fact of being mysterious.

(Check this post by Seth Godin to understand more about how spread happens in social media)

If we understand these two reasons of why viral videos spread, it’s clear to understand that the UPS does not make much sense in this new context. We don’t want the viral video to distinguish from its competitors in its core content. What we want is in the prestige (final part of the viral video) the UPS being finally presented to the consumer, creating an illusion of what actually the video was for.

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Online video advertising became part of our lives. At the present moment, video portals such as youtube and vimeo, became the host of thousands of videos uploaded everyday that we, internet users unable to not press a link when it says it’s a video, watch, laugh and pass around our friends and share in social networks. My focus in this post will be one kind of videos: Viral videos.

Virals became part of guerrila advertising not so long time ago. Advertising agencies realized its power to spread, and reach in a couple of hours thousands of views, impressive we have to admit. It’s indeed a powerful tool. But my question is, will the power of virals be constrained just to the world wide web? Could it be possible to be used in other forms of media?

My answer to this question is: IT SHOULD. I see a good viral as a band playing in the street. If it’s good music people will stay to watch until it’s over, they’ll call their friends, their friends call other friends, and people will gather around. This metaphor i find quite interesting because I believe that the future of viral videos is in ambient advertising: leaving the internet surface and going to outdoors environment.

I believe it’s not really complicated to imagine this scenario. Outdoor advertising is getting old, advertising needs new fresh air in the streets. It’s already happening here and there, but what I’m talking is that it’ll become global and people will decide which viral will be in it. How? simple, cellphones are in the pockets of everyone and one text message away of deciding what they wanna see. I believe that there are endless of opportunities in this field that from what I’ve known hasn’t been explored quite yet.

Conclusion: Guerrilla advertising viral videos, in my opinion, will become a daily basis in outdoors advertising, where everyone would be able to be involved and choose which is viral that should be playing right here and right now.

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This following post relates to my conception of Advertising. The difference between the producers and the consumers in advertising, and mainly what good advertising essentially is and the rules of the game when it turns to engage users to some form of advertisement.

Make Consumers feel more Intelligent. Everyone loves to feel good and feel that they are smart when perceiving something. It can be a simple mathematical operation, or even associating a song to a movie. The rule is that people love to discover the link that connects A to B, which makes them feel good with that they are interacting with. I believe it’s the same thing occurs in Advertising, people want to feel smart when they look to a piece of advertisement in front of them. Unconsciously they want to connect the different parts, the visuals with the words, the words with the sound, and the sound with the motion. Being end users of advertising, consumers want to understand the magic trick beyond it. Hence, my point here is that what differentiates good advertisement from bad, is that you need to give that space to comprehension and the conclusion to be taken, that’s exactly what people will remember from the ad. The visual? the copy? Maybe they will, but probably they will be bombarded with 10 thousand more that day and possibly they will forget, but in what comes to “their own” achievement they got from seeing the ad, that will last longer, that’s how human brain works.

Make Producers feel less Ego-Related. The creative brief is the necessary input for the production team. The problem i want to point here is that during the course of the production (graphic design+motion design+flash design+…), care should be taken in order to always keep in mind what’s the objective of the campaign. As so-called artists that belong to the production team, they tend to treat their work as a big canvas where perfection is the word to remember. The fact that most of the times is forgotten, is that beautiful work is pointless if it does not comply with the client brief and so with the creative brief. Ego-related action regarding the production part, creates the division between beautiful work that does not really fulfill what was asked for. If the objective of the campaign was to increase sales by 200% then obviously that the flash banner should have a clear button saying “click here”, or something similar, if in other hand, the objective of the campaign is to increase the awareness of the brand for the target group from 15 to 25 years old, probably the visuals will have the biggest importance in the deliverables. The key point to remember here is: special care should be taken when it comes to produce a given idea due to the fact that first it needs to comply with the objectives of the client, and just then it should embrace the infinite creativity of the production team.

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