Going viral on YouTube

Abstract

Consumers are increasingly watching online video and
advertisers are increasingly using video-sharing sites such as
YouTube to promote their video advertisements. Although not
typically the case, some of these advertisements go viral, quickly
reaching millions of consumers. To better understand the
antecedents of such virality, this paper recounts recent
advertisements on YouTube that attained viral status. From these
cases, several commonalities are observed, such that each ad evoked
strong emotion, told a story and quickly reached 1 million views.
Based on these observations, when promoting brand content on
YouTube, managers are urged to focus on promoting highly emotive
content, to incorporate the brand within a story, and to
continually produce and promote novel brand content. Building on
the present work, there are also opportunities for future research
to consider how specific ad characteristics such as storytelling
and schadenfreude might affect the probability of virality.