America’s First Social Video Lab Opens To Help Brands Find Out What Makes An Ad Go Viral

Branded videos shared 500,000 times every 24 hours; Unruly’s New York lab helps marketers make the most of this trend through exclusive, customized insight.

NEW YORK, LA, DETROIT, CHICAGO – June 11, 2013 – What makes a video go viral? Why do some online ads attract millions of shares across the social web while others largely go unnoticed? And why should advertisers care? A new lab – based in New York and the first of its kind in America – today opens its doors to help brands and agencies find out.

The Social Video Lab, developed by video technology company Unruly, is designed to help brands make their video content contagious. The leading global platform for social video marketing, Unruly has tracked over 329 billion video views, worked with leading academic institutions and delivered data-driven insight for two-thirds of the Interbrand 100 since 2006.

Visitors to the New York lab will be given a hands-on interactive journey through the science and history of online video sharing, plus current video trends. They will also have access to Unruly’s portfolio of technology products and services, developed to help brands formulate their entire social video strategies, from start to finish. Brands can find out how their current social video footprint compares with their competitors, how to create shareable content and how to determine the distribution strategy required to achieve their campaign goals.

Visitors will also be able to test the shareability of their own campaigns using Unruly ShareRank™, an algorithm-based tool which uses over 10,000 data points to predict the number of shares a video will attract, before it is even launched, meeting the seemingly impossible desire to ‘predict viral success’.

“Video is the world’s fastest-growing ad format in terms of marketing spend, so it’s really important that brands have their fingers on the pulse and allocate their marketing dollars wisely. Leaving it to luck simply isn’t an option,” said Sarah Wood, co-founder and COO of Unruly. “Our video distribution platform has delivered more than 2,500 campaigns since 2007, including record-breakers such as Evian Roller Babies and Dove Real Beauty Sketches. That experience, coupled with our proprietary technology and real-time social video analytics, will give brands access to the kind of detailed consumer insights, competition contexts and the global audience reach they need to fulfill their full potential when it comes to social video.

“Creating and distributing shareable content for social media is at the top of the agenda for CMOs, and brands can use the Lab experience to pinpoint exactly what’s trending. Right now, brands are creating controversial, provoking content to fill up the year that has been dubbed ‘#Empty 13’. We can advise advertisers how to pounce on the hottest trends before they become mainstream and how they can utilize this insight to generate meaningful paid and earned media,” Wood continued.

Karen Nelson-Field, Senior Research Associate at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science, at the University of South Australia, added: “Brands that do their homework, from video creation through to clear call to actions on video players, can benefit from increased ROI. We’ve been working with Unruly to examine the DNA of successful branded video content for the past two years and our shared mission is to help brands realize the potential of their ads so that they can create great, shareable content.”

Recent research from the Unruly Social Video Lab shows:

• There is a huge appetite for branded videos on the web. Every 24 hours, there are more than half-a-million shares of online video ads tracked (506,976);
• Overt branding has little or no effect on a video’s shareability;
• One quarter of an average ad’s shares occur within the first three days of its launch;
• Branded content accounts for 4% of the Top 100 Most Shared Vines in comparison with 1% of the Top 100 Most Shared Videos;
• Online videos which elicit strong positive emotions, such as hilarity or exhilaration, are shared 30% most often than those which elicit negative emotions, such as sadness and shock.

Since the launch of Unruly’s London Social Video Lab in 2012, over 50 top brands have visited the lab.

To find out more about the lab and the variety of workshops available, click here.

About Unruly

Video technology company Unruly is the leading global platform for social video marketing and works with top brands and their agencies to predict the emotional impact of their videos and get them watched, tracked and shared across paid, owned and earned media. We use our proprietary technology to turn target audiences into engaged viewers and engaged viewers into customers and advocates. Brands use our social analytics dashboard to benchmark their content, outsmart the competition and demonstrate superior ROI. We’re dedicated to finding elegant, data-driven solutions to the social marketing problems that challenge brand advertisers in today’s cluttered and confusing media landscape.

In a nutshell, brands use Unruly to join the dots on Facebook, YouTube and the social web. The Unruly Viral Video Chart has tracked 329 billion video streams since 2006. With an engaged audience of 978 million consumers, across the full range of mobile, tablet and second screen devices, Unruly has delivered, tracked and audited 2.8 billion video views across 2,500+ social video campaigns for over 400 brands including Coca-Cola, T-Mobile, Volkswagen, Microsoft, Warner Brothers and adidas. We’ve worked with 60% of Interbrand’s Top 100 Best Global Brands and our mission is to deliver the most awesome social video advertising campaigns on the planet.

Founded in 2006, Unruly has 11 offices and employs over 125 people globally. In 2012, Unruly secured a $25 million Series A investment – the largest ever for a private company in the social video space. The company has won over 15 awards including “Best Content Distribution Service” at the Braves Awards; “Digital Innovator of the Year” at the Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100 and #14 on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA 2012. To find out more visit www.unrulymedia.com

UNRULY, UNRULY MEDIA, UNRULY SHARERANK, THE UNRULY VIRAL VIDEO CHART and associated names, marks, logos and designs are trademarks and/or registered trademarks owned by Unruly Group Limited in the United Kingdom, United States and elsewhere.