Heineken sponsors dog fighting?!
No. Heineken does not.
Agreed, on first look it's a shocking image that has been round and round the angry swirling pool of online posts from fuming animal rights groups that apparently shows Heineken sponsorship banners on display at a dog fight. Having worked with Heineken Live recently it's something that deeply saddens the people there; it's a PR nightmare that just won't go away despite doing everything possible to explain how the photo came about.
To clarify:
A Mongolian nightclub owner put on a party and set up Heineken banners, later he then rented out his club for a dog fight but did not take the banners down, the photo was taken, it was discovered online and internet rage ensued.
It led to Heineken commissioning this infographic to help try and clear things up.
Unfortunately for Heineken this image just won't go away and has damaged the brand significantly. Every time it's assumed that everything has been explained for the last time the photo is yet again snatched up and furiously shared across various social networks.
After seeing it for the twentieth time online I realised that this was possibly one of the most successful anti-campaigns that a global brand has experienced. It was originally discovered online in April 2012 and circulated, but since then it has experienced several revivals and manages to capture the exact same intensity of emotion every time it comes round the block. As far as anti-campaigns go, it's unfortunately an incredibly successful one, I don't know of any actual campaigns that have even come close to the number of lifecycles that the Heineken one has had. It's the opposite of the Holy Grail of viral campaigns; an image that is relentlessly shared based on emotion. Brands pay advertising agencies a lot of money to try and come up with images which will somehow capture an emotion and compel the viewer to share it. But it's very difficult to do with a single image, hence the rise and rise of video marketing content, and the desire to "make it go viral".
The JCVD & Volvo campaign is the perfect example of this working the way a brand wants it to, 70 million views and counting. An immediately recognisable image from the advert that drove viewers crazy with excitement (was it for real, and how??). But the issue is that this was a video campaign, and not a single still image. Video content is widely consumed but nothing will compare to the amount that it is going to be used. It is on the verge of exploding onto every possible screen in every possible space in 2014, don't take just my word for it. The reason video creation and consumption is going to go flipping mental is because the infrastructure is finally in place to deliver it (fast enough connection speeds on devices that display it well, via services that are easy to use). The reason video is easier to use as a marketing medium is because with an single image it's much harder to encapsulate the brand and build a powerful enough emotion to drive the viewer to sharing it on.
Currently, images that have been doing well are ones that are used as part of a teaser to an article or video page. This used to be solely the territory of savvy YouTube users who knew that if you included a single frame of a woman's cleavage at the right point in a video that it could be selected as the video thumbnail preview image and in turn would generate huge amounts of video views because of 'curious' users clicking on it. However, this technique has evolved to become big business and posts (especially ones on Facebook) that feature "expertly crafted click-bait headlines and content designed to tug hard on heartstrings" do very well in terms of attracting huge volumes of traffic. This has become a common trend for content curation sites such as Upworthy, and there's a very good article on it all here.
Making a viral video is much easier than making a viral image. The image becomes a much more integral part of the brand and has to be flexible enough to be reused in different contexts (I'm pretty sure the dog fighting image has been claimed to be set in dozens of different countries). When it comes to an image that can be used over and over again the obvious answer is the internet meme, and the obvious case study for a meme used as a campaign is the Virgin Media success baby.
But, this was a campaign built on top of an already popular internet meme. Yes, it was still very clever (using success baby to sell digital services to people familiar with memes = jackpot) but it was not created for the purpose of the campaign, success baby was already popular and Virgin Media jumped on that.
"But there's loads of super popular images out there on the web!"
Yes, there are. Something like the Hand Of Hope is a great example of an image that went viral and was shared by people because it evoked a powerful emotion. The photo is of a surgeon who performed life saving surgery on a baby boy that was still in the womb, and at one point he was frozen with emotion as the baby reached out and grabbed his finger. Powerful, yes. But it wasn't a branded image.
Brands work hard to create a popular corner of the web by posting numerous images that as a collection build up the brand and what it represents. RedBull do this particularly well on their Instagram account. So we've got branded images becoming popular, but they're not super popular, probably will not be shared more than once by the same person, and it's a collection of images that capture the brand not a single image.
And this is really what this is all about; there hasn't yet been a successful campaign for a global brand that uses a single image that creates a hugely powerful emotion in people to compel them to share it with their friends through a number of user-generated campaign lifecycles at zero cost to the brand beyond the initial brief. (Perhaps that's the reason brands were originally designed logos, because it's just not possible to assign a single image to a brand). But things have evolved far beyond the days of MadMen-esque advertising and now the digital marketing landscape is receptive to the concept of the viral campaign image, but it's just that no one has cracked it yet.
Or has there already been a great image that does this? Let me know in the comments below.
-- Edit --
I wrote this post yesterday, and today I woke up to read that it actually happened. I'm a little surprised by the timing of it!
Last night Ellen DeGeneres hosted the Oscars 2014 and went on to make internet history by Tweeting a selfie which has become the most shared image (3 million retweets and counting) on Twitter. Needless to say it's sent people into a frenzy; the light-heartedness and apparent spontaneity of it all has captured people's emotions and resulted in a keen urge to share it on.
This is it.
A super viral campaign image.
As far as branded images go, this is the Holy Grail that I mentioned earlier. Firstly, it was organised by Samsung who are one of the sponsors of the Academy Awards Ceremony, and this will go down in history as a defining moment for the Oscars, mobile phone technology, journalism, and viral images.
Then it's also great promotion for the Ellen DeGeneres and her brand, and all the celebrities involved in the shot (including Kevin Spacey who pulled the best pose), and brilliantly also for the brother of Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o (for her role in 12 Years A Slave), Peter Nyong'o who successfully photobombed the selfie.
And so it's begun. Samsung (via Ellen) instigated a historical picture, a super viral campaign image, and as Mashable aptly puts it, "the internet has only made it better". It's already a meme, and no doubt this selfie will experience several lifecycles as it goes through hundreds of online articles and shared posts.
Samsung did it first, and hats off to them.
Now every other brand will be furiously working out how they can top it.
