Powerful uses of viral video

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a San Diego American Marketing Association event covering businesses using viral video to raise awareness and build their brands. The keynote speaker was Dan Novak, VP Global Marketing, Communications and PR at Qualcomm. Dan was an entertaining and influential advocate of his company’s use of viral video. He was also modest and quick to give his marketing team and agencies credit for the ultra creative work. Dan presented what has become an incredibly successful series of viral videos for Qualcomm that were released around April Fool’s Day for the past two years and just before one of Qualcomm’s biggest industry conferences. The two viral videos proved to be paradigm shifting for what you’d think Qualcomm might produce. Viral videos Handsolo and Convergence break down any preconceived notions of stodginess from a Fortune 500 leader like Qualcomm.


The results of releasing these award-winning viral videos have been tremendous, including:

1) Enormous Industry Buzz – As they say with social media “you don’t communicate to your audience, you communicate through your audience.” These videos passed like wildfire through exactly the stakeholders Qualcomm would like most to reach – all the bright technical people in their ecosystem.

2) Household Name Recognition – These videos were also picked-up by bloggers and trackers of April Fool’s Day videos and extended to a still wider audience who may know little about Qualcomm.

3) Employee Pride – Staffers were able to wallow in the “cool” factor of their company. This was especially true for the Convergence video which used real employees.

4) Recruiting New Talent – Aside from being fun introduction videos any Sales Person would kill to show as an icebreaker, these videos do volumes for Qualcomm efforts to recruit the brightest talent coming out of today’s colleges and universities.

5) Creating Pent-up Demand for the 2010 Video – Awareness has moved to expectation; Qualcomm’s stakeholders are pining to know what kind of video this April will bring.

These and other Qualcomm videos are available on the Qualcomm website “video wall” which is very reminiscent of the brightly lit Qualcomm “Patent Wall” that glows like a beacon at night from their headquarters.

ROI sticklers in the audience wanted to know the revenue payback measures of these viral videos for Qualcomm. Dan responded with statistics surrounding the explosive number of views and visits to their site and even the less specific brand awareness improvements coming from efforts like these and everything else Qualcomm does to support their brand. In the end, it is hard to put a $ value on efforts like these to know if they work. But based upon the positive response of everyone in Qualcomm’s eco-system, Qualcomm executives can rest easy at night knowing their brand is thriving from programs like the viral videos.