Farming in the media - part three

In the third part of our "Farming in the media" series, we examine the concept of viral videos to further highlight the rigours of farming.

The concept of a viral video became named in 2009, although these forms of videos that were shared between friends and work colleagues started in around 1995, do you remember the Dancing Baby videos? The idea of the video is to gain an immediate hit with the viewer and less focus on the advertiser, so that the video gets passed like a 'virus'.

In 2009, Samsung, launched their range of smart LED technology with a YouTube clip of sheep on a Welsh hillside creating assorted works of art. The low tech filming worked with the audience and the video gained an audience of 4 million just after one week. It had risen to over 200,000 views. With three or four videos of varying lengths, one version of Samsung's glowing sheep can be viewed below:

 In 2011, the producers of Yeo Valley produced an advert that spanned both the viral video community and entered into the charts on iTunes, a music site from Apple computers. The ad agency BBH (Bartle Bogel and Hegarty) released the advert within an advert break of the X-Factor. The advert included young people of the X-Factor demographic, singing (also a part of the X-Factor show) as well as being shot on location in Somerset whilst including agricultural, conservation and environmental keywords were inserted within the rap.

The Yeo Valley viral video, under the guidance of BBH, goes further as it links further sites of social networking as the blog from Tamsin Fox Davies explains. The initial video had the ingredients of the viral video, as listed by Tamsin Fox Davies, being catchy, cool, funny, good production values, informative, relevant and targeted to the audience. It wants you to find out more and it even shows you where to get it. So how did the Yeo Valley extend its social network experience, I urge you to the look at the aforementioned blog, but in summary - BBH created a YouTube spoof (entitled Yeo Tube) site with more Yeo Valley videos, a Facebook page with a singing competition (extending the X-Factor targeting), a Twitter account, an iTunes download of the original song and finally an official website.

The blog by Real Business gets down to the brass tacks of the campaign by asking what was the return on the investment of the advert. The details, below were written on the 31st of March 2011, showed that "brand awareness had increased by 71%" and approximately "half a million more households in the UK brought our products in the 12 weeks to December 2010" and Yeo Valley's  retail value increased by "14.9% year on year outperforming the rest of the yoghurt market by more than 2.5 times". 

So should advertisers create more country-friendly to create a better informed idea of what the countryside is and does? Do these two examples of viral videos that advertise both food and non food products show a good view of the country? Do you know of any similar campaigns that farming and rural enterprises have used social networks in their advertising campaigns? I await your thoughts...