don't freak out

A nice ad for Canal+ that pretty much says it all.

Is the VW Fun Theory campaign where it’s at? Yesterday I met a woman who works for the agency responsible for the campaign, and when I mentioned it her response was “Yes it’s an amazing campaign. Brilliant.” The view figures are certainly impressive, and no doubt it is being regarded as successful by all involved.

Over 6.5 million views is not to be sneezed at. It certainly shows the content of the video, and the story being told is engaging people and, more importantly, motivating them to pass it on. It ticks all the right boxes for viral success – authenticity/truth, joy , OMG factor and unobtrusive branding. So successful viral video, yes. Campaign? Perhaps.

Firstly, two weeks and three or four views in, I went to the companion website and discovered an accompanying campaign competition. The URL is in the video title, but that’s about it, and until recently the video text was only in Swedish. Other than that there didn’t seem to be much direction to the site. Once there, the website is slow to load, clunkily put together and not really offering anything outside the videos on the front page. Clearly most people are not engaging with it either, given that on thefuntheory.com website the paino stairs video has 16 comments, and on YouTube it has almost 2700. Either that or the videos on YouTube had failed to adequately alert/encourage them to the website.

The competition itself seems fairly il-defined. According to the site, the top 10 will be decided by a jury, and then put on “public display in Stockholm” which really could be anything, including arguably just leaving them on the website and doing nothing additional with them. Clearly the campaign and the competition had been conceived as something for the Swedish market only, and when the videos went viral and truly international, outside of translating the video and the website to English there appears to have been very little done to ‘cross the chasm‘. €2500 isn’t particularly international prize money and a display in Stockholm will also only have limited appeal.

It remains to be seen what people come up with as entries for the competition, but at the point of writing there was only 20 entries there. Further, the uploading and display system presents the ideas in a messy stack of images and video, with page architecture that seems to be falling apart (http://thefuntheory.com/?q=entries). No one is commenting here either, so it will be interesting to see if people begin to engage with this component of the campaign as time progresses and more entries go up, and if they fix the website.