youtube

Those crazy lab-coated dudes from Eepybird.com (yes, the Diet Coke and Mentos guys) are at it again; this time with sticky notes.

And it looks as though this time around, they have a budget. I love how it conjures up images of Slinky commercials, Office Space and of course the original experiments with the aforementioned soda and candy. Watch with amazement as they give new life to an otherwise mundane office stationary product:

I spotted this on Freyburg.com, a presentation by Micheal Wesch at the Library of Congress about the anthropology of YouTube. 

Wesch created a (positively brilliant, imo) video entitled "The Machine is Us/ing Us" earlier this year that shot to the top of the YouTube charts; it serves as just one of loads of examples that he uses here to illustrate the similarities and differences between life online, on a webcam, and in real life. His students at Kansas State University assisted in a semester long research project, and this speech is the culmination of that work. 

It runs a little long for an online video, but the content is fascinating throughout its 55 min run time: 

Tomorrow, we say "so long" to Mark Freeman, our Diplomatic Relations Manager, as he heads off to the Masters of Digital Media Program.

Mark has already written a very eloquent final post, and now we have to prepare for life without him here in the office. And so in reality show fashion, I thought it would be fitting if we take a look back at Mark's history here at Strutta. 

Remember 5 Questions with Mark Freeman, when we were first getting to know him? 

And then there was of course the now famous lip dub video, ably directed by Mark himself, in which he makes a cameo: 

Office Lip Dub - Blister in the Sun, by Strutta.com from Jordan Behan on Vimeo

Or perhaps you recall the time that he let it all hang out in our happy dance video: 

Mark, already an accomplished documentarian and philanthropist,  originally came to Strutta after to responding to an ad I posted looking for someone to sort through the entire catalog of YouTube videos, hunting for the best stuff in obscure categories. I knew that such a task would require a certain sense of both humor and detachment. While it may have sounded like a fun and easy job on the surface, it was anything but. Pouring through 1000's of often mind-numbing online video content in search of the gems is considerably more daunting than it sounds, but in the face of this difficulty, Mark flourished. He parsed the good from the bad, the popular from the mundane and was able to plot the resulting data onto spreadsheets that help us put everything in context. Along the way, he served as our de facto translator of (seemingly) all of the Asian languages, including all comments and blog coverage from the far east that we have received. And before you ask, yes, he responds in Japanese and Korean. 

But Mark wasn't done. In his second act at Strutta, he served as the single point of accountability for QA on the site, and later embarked on an extensive research project that involved all manners of online promotions, sweepstakes and social media submission contests. Again, he was able to compile his findings into digestible packets that we could make sense of. 

But before he left us, he surprised us with yet another skill. He's been cranking out Photoshop mock-ups for potential clients for the past two weeks, and the feedback from the resulting work has been overwhelmingly positive. 

I don't mean to lay it on TOO thick, but as Mark departs us to pursue higher education (what could be higher education than 8 months of steady YouTube watching? I mean, SRSLY) it seemed only fitting to send him off with a fitting tribute; one that is representative of the anguish we'll feel when we gaze at his empty chair. 

Oh. No wait. I see Maura has already gone over and staked a claim on his desk and chair, and has even started some sketches to decorate what will be her new space. I think she likes the view from there. 

Stiil, Mark, you'll be missed.  

It's time to reflect on marketing, the meaning of life and YouTube. I learned a lot from online video, not so much from watching online video but more so from watching what people watch online.

Over the past couple of months I've kept a spreadsheet of the daily top 100 YouTube videos. Crunching the numbers reveals an incredible number of consistencies and human habits, to the extent that if an alien were to only watch the top 100 videos on YouTube to understand our species, they could convincingly argue that our only interests are: pain, breasts, paranoia, soccer, cartoons, soap operas, Obama.

These interests are cross-cultural, although some are more popular in certain languages than others, which is important because a popular video in one language has a halo-effect that increases the popularity of other videos in that language. Soap operas are most popular in Mandarin and Arabic (19% of the top 100 videos today are clips from Arabic soap operas) and the Taiwanese soap opera Fated to Love You (命中注定我愛你) can take up 35% of the top videos on the Monday following a new episode. Cartoons, however, are only in Japanese, which is consistently the second most popular language after English, possibly because videos with breasts are always in English or Japanese. Political videos are usually in English, Mandarin or Italian. Soccer comes in every language, as does pain.

I shouldn't've been so surprised, but I hadn't anticipated to what extent people like to see other people get hurt. From the Japanese newscaster that broke his neck jumping into a rice paddie on live television, to the Cuban athlete that kicked a ref in the face at the Olympics (6 of today's top 100, four days after it happened), pain is popular. Almost getting hurt is equally popular (see Kobe's jumping over the car commercial) and learning about what could hurt you is immensely popular no matter how unlikely (see 9-11 conspiracy videos and those cellphone popping popcorn videos (EVERYBODY PANIC!)).

The cellphone popcorn videos worked well because they remind me about how my cousin's wife read an article that said a doctor read an article that said cellphone's give you brain cancer--the videos fit into an established cultural meme and a basic emotional instinct: fear. Not that all marketing campaigns have to do this, but trying to make people do things and think things they don't already do and think is very difficult. Creative takes on established norms work best, online and off.

Bell recently tried to launch a real-world viral marketing campaign in cities across Canada for the Samsung Instinct phone by posting billboards and bus ads with nothing but a blue mark and the letters "er". I'm sure some marketing genius sold Bell on the idea that everyone in Canada would be chatting at the water cooler about what the "er er er" on the side of the bus might mean. But why would they?

Besides, every morning, on my way to work, I ride a full bus past a heroin shooting gallery, a pack of crack dealers in an alley and a superbuff woman voluntarily directing traffic wearing pink sneakers and turquoise shortshorts. A billboard with an "er" on it doesn't even register.

I don't want to suggest there's a magic formula to viral marketing but I do think the Bell campaign failed because it didn't play into a human emotional need. Online video sites allow us to easily track what people want to watch, and with so much media available that does fit viewer interests, there's failure and mediocrity in store for marketers that ignore what people want to see.

And what do they want to see? Well, if we combined all of the most popular videos from the last 8 months, theoretically, I think the most popular video of all time would be Japanese-language news footage of four women wearing bikinis, driving golf carts, trying to run over Ronaldinho while shouting, "Yes, we can!"

That's it for me here at Strutta. It's been great. Thanks to the Strutta crew and everyone I've met while working here!

When you're watching videos on the internet today, you could, like most people, watch that clip of Miss USA falling at the Miss Universe pageant- a clip that accounts for 18 of the top 100 videos on YouTube at the moment, including the top two most watched videos - or you could do something more productive, like learn Swahili!