One to One Interactive has released a study conducted by OTOInsights, its research/neuromarketing arm, that examines why some Internet videos go viral.

General Findings

[D]ata from the study does not suggest any correlation between engagement, emotion, and the length of a video. Long videos (three minutes or greater) and short videos (two minutes or less) are equally likely to have high or low engagement scores. This finding suggests that Internet videos do not need to be limited to sound bite productions or even standard television commercial length. Internet video viewers are willing to view longer productions so long as they’re engaging.

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Insight 1: Viewer Responses to Internet Videos are Emotionally Complex
… Marketers need to be aware of the range and complexity of emotional responses to quickly consumed and produced digital creatives like Internet video. Similarly, marketers need to guard against allowing their research and analysis methods to become overly reductive about emotional response. Emotional states are seldom monolithic. Even if the videos seem self-evident in their meanings, viewers’ reactions to them are quietly sophisticated.

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Insight 2:  Engagement Scores Substantially Enhance Interpretability of User Ratings
Marketers designing and evaluating digital media creative assets are not well served by the lack of feedback provided by common ratings systems. Given the importance of ratings systems in video popularity…, it is critical that marketers develop a better understanding of why users might give a video an undesirable rating.

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Insight 3: Viewer Engagement and Video Success are Positively Linked
This data suggests that a certain level of emotional engagement is a necessary, though not sufficient, predictor of a viral video’s success. In other words, it is unlikely that a video lacking a certain amount of emotional engageability will spread virally, regardless of other factors. At the same time, just because a video has this emotional engageability by no means guarantees that it will go viral; other factors (e.g., word of mouth, computer-based recommendation systems, and trendy cultural topics and memes) will influence a given video’s viral ability.

Some of the methods and findings rely too heavily on OTOInsights proprietary methodology to be immediately applicable to most people.  But if you’re considering employing video in your marketing efforts,  the general points are helpful reminders and challenges to the often simplistic ideas we have about what makes for successful videos.

(Hat tip to Roger Dooley of Neuromarketing.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 17th, 2008 at 10:22 am and is filed under Marketing, Research, Social Media, Technology, Web.